Summaries: the best scientific articles for medicine and health care summarized

Summary with the article: Epigenetics: Stress makes its molecular mark - Nestler (2012)

Some people who are exposed to stress are more vulnerable to negative outcomes than others. Differences in epigenetics may explain this vulnerability. Epigenetic mechanisms provide short and long-term responses to stress.

Aggressive mice

When a person is stressed, gene expressions in areas the brain will be activated or inhibited. Many stress-induced changes are adaptive, but some are also harmful and can be permanent. Research has been done using mice which were exposed to other, aggressive mice. After ten days of this experiment, the mice started to avoid these other mice. They also became less interested, less adventurous and more likely to be obese. These symptoms could last for months and could be treated with antidepressants. It turned out that mice that had been given cocaine a week before being exposed to aggressive mice had more stress-related

Effects of cytokines on the brain and pituitary - Wilkinson & Brown, 2015. Unclear which article the source of this summary exactly is. The authors of the original text have also written an extensive book on neuroendocrinology: An Introduction to Neuroendocrinology.

Effects of cytokines

Cytokines have an influence on the brain and pituitary. The pituitary and target cell hormones affect immune cells via feedback. Messengers of the immune system are called immunomodulators, because they have modulator actions on the brain and endocrine system.

Location of cytokines

Cytokines are also produced by the brain with pro-inflammatory processes. With in situ hybridisation we can localise and quantify cytokine gene expression, in order to prove that a particular cytokine is synthesised

Summary of the article: Is treating motor problems in DCD just a matter of practice and more practice? (2015) - Schoenmaker et. al.

What is DCD?

Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is a motor learning deficit, referring to children whose acquisition and execution of motor skills is substantially below their age and opportunities for learning. This includes the ability to perform daily activities, participate in sports, and occupy oneself with leisure activities.

Some important processes in learning these skills is being able to learn through observation, detect one's own errors, and change one's behaviour according to this self-monitoring. This paper discusses

Summary with the article: The role of the self in responses to health communications: a cultural perspective by Sherman et. al. (2011)

Health problems are of a pancultural nature and because of this, some researchers think that there might be a pancultural health solution. Every country needs to deal with problems of oral health, smoking-related illnesses and many other problems. Many problems arise from issues of self-regulation and health problems can be changed by changing health behaviours. Researchers need to find a way to put health communications together with dimensions of the self, in order to change health behaviours. In this article, the writers argue that a cultural consideration of the self can help create more effective health messages. A cultural consideration of the

The medial temporal lobe (MTL) plays an important role in memory. The study discussed in this article examines how cell activity patterns transform visual information into long-term memory memories such as faces. The question of how this happens has plagued neuroscientists for decades. Evidence comes from electron physiology and lesion studies in monkeys. This shows that there is a hierarchical organization along the ventral visual pathway from the visual cortex V1 to the inferior temporal cortex (IT). Visual stimuli come in through this way and are processed and stored. How this information is exactly presented in there, remains a mystery.

Hypotheses

Two ideas for this representation have been drawn up based on two visions:

• Idea 1: The

Recognition of visual objects

The recognition of visual objects is fundamental. Research often takes place with a repeated cognitive task with two essential requirements: invariance and specificity. Cells from the inferotemporal cortex (IT, the highest visual area in the ventral visual pathway) appear to play a key role in object recognition. The cells respond to what one sees with complex objects such as faces. Certain neurons respond specifically to certain faces and not to other faces. The question remains: how can they respond to different faces while the stimulus offer is practically the same in the retina?

This is also reflected in the striate cortex in cats. Both simple and complex cells respond to a presented bar.

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of how perceptrons classify patterns, and to highlight the importance of squashing functions such as activation functions and the learning opportunities of perceptrons.

Basic principles of perceptrons

A perceptron is a neural network in which neurons from different layers are connected to each other. A basic perceptron is shown in Figure 1 of the article. The network consists of two input neurons (x and y) and one output neuron (U). In general, perceptrons can have multiple input neurons and multiple output neurons. The output of neuron x is given by its output activation

This article provides a graphical perspective on the arithmetic challenges of object recognition. It also looks at which neuronal population is responsible for the representation of objects. Our daily activities are accompanied by quick and accurate recognition of visual stimuli; this way we can recognize thousands of objects within seconds. However, which brain mechanisms are involved in this process is still unknown.

Object recognition is defined as being able to accurately distinguish objects or categories from all kinds of possible stimuli. This is done via the retina through an identification-prescribing transformation. Object recognition is difficult for a variety of reasons. The main reason is that every object can produce an infinite number of different images on the retina, while this image is still recognized