Reversing pathological neural activity using targeted plasticity

By N. Engineer, Jonathan R. Riley, Jonathan D. Seale, W. A. Vrana, Jai A. Shetake, Sindhu Sudanagunta, M. S. Borland, M. Kilgard. Nature, 2011

675 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Brain changes in response to nerve damage or cochlear trauma can generate pathological neural activity that is believed to be responsible for many types of chronic pain and tinnitus. Several studies have reported that the severity of chronic pain and tinnitus is correlated with the degree of map reorganization in somatosensory and auditory cortex, respectively. Direct electrical or transcranial magnetic stimulation of sensory cortex can temporarily disrupt these phantom sensations. However, there is as yet no direct evidence for a causal role of plasticity in the generation of pain or tinnitus. Here we report evidence that reversing the brain changes responsible can eliminate the perceptual impairment in an animal model of noise-induced tinnitus. Exposure to intense noise degrades the frequency tuning of auditory cortex neurons and increases cortical synchronization. Repeatedly pairing tones with brief pulses of vagus nerve stimulation completely eliminated the physiological and behavioural correlates of tinnitus in noise-exposed rats. These improvements persisted for weeks after the end of therapy. This method for restoring neural activity to normal may be applicable to a variety of neurological disorders.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Neurology, Sensory Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d1d21943d876a89d5a6a74896d9753c4e7b7c414

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Nicolas Frémaux
2. Wulfram Gerstner
3. Janet F. Werker
4. David McAlpine
5. Ranulfo Romo
6. Roland Schaette
7. Takao K. Hensch
8. Friedemann Zenke

In Neurology

1. David McAlpine
2. Wulfram Gerstner
3. Nicolas Frémaux
4. Roland Schaette
5. Takao K. Hensch

In Sensory Systems

1. David McAlpine
2. Roland Schaette
3. Takao K. Hensch

Citations in the corpus

• Phantom percepts: Tinnitus and pain as persisting aversive memory networks (2011, background): “Furthermore, these remapping changes normalize when the pain (21) or the tinnitus improves (22).”
• Tinnitus with a Normal Audiogram: Physiological Evidence for Hidden Hearing Loss and Computational Model (2011, background): “In rats, the degree of reorganization of the auditory cortex is correlated with the strength of behavioral evidence for tinnitus (Engineer et al., 2011), supporting an involvement of cortical structures.”
• Neuromodulated Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity, and Theory of Three-Factor Learning Rules (2016, background): “More recently, it has been shown that vagus nerve stimulation triggering release of a mix of neuromodulators gates plasticity (Engineer et al., 2011).”
• Critical periods in speech perception: new directions. (2015, background): “Stimulation of the basal forebrain or vagus nerve raises neuromodulatory tone to produce CP plasticity in adult A1 (Engineer et al. 2011, Kilgard & Merzenich 1998) sufficient to correct a rodent model of tinnitus.”