Increased Right Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Connectivity During Emotion Recognition Task in Adolescents With Self-Injurious Behavior: A Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study

Objective@#Research on neural correlates in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) associated with self-injurious behavior has mainly been performed in adults. However, studies on adolescents are scarce. We aimed to investigate the activation and connectivity of the PFC between adolescents with self-injurious behavior (ASI) and psychiatric controls (PC) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). @*Methods@#We used an emotion recognition task during fNIRS to assess 37 adolescents (23 with self-injurious behavior and 14 PC) between June 2020 and October 2021 and compared connectivity and activation between the two groups. We also measured adverse childhood events (ACE, Adverse Childhood Experiences) and performed a correlation analysis of channel activation according to ACE total scores. @*Results@#The difference in activation between the groups was not statistically significant. The connectivity of channel 6 was statistically significant. The interaction between channel 6 and the ACE total score showed statistical significance between the two groups(t[33] -2.61; p=0.014). The ASI group showed a negative correlation with the total ACE score. @*Conclusion@#This is the first study to investigate PFC connectivity using fNIRS in ASI. It has the implication of a novel attempt with a practically useful tool to uncover neurobiological differences among Korean adolescents.

Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells: Next Generation Stem Cells to Clinical Applications / 한양의대학술지

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) are specially manipulated cells from somatic cells by the introduction of four factors that are reprogrammed. The properties of iPSC are similar to embryonic stem cells (ESC) characteristic of self-renewal and pluripotency. The technology of reprogramming somatic cells to iPSC enables the generation of patient-specific cells that can be used as powerful tools for drug screening, in vitro models for human disease and autologous transplantation. The iPSC technology provides a priceless resource for regenerative medicine but there are still changing obstacles over the safety of iPSC in avoiding induction of tumorigenicity and maintaining high purity of re-differentiated cells from iPSC to produce more functional cells for cell therapy. A variety of methods to overcome the limitation of iPSC application applied in the clinical setting have been developed. In this review, we summarize the recent progress in iPSC generation and differentiation techniques to facilitate clinical application of iPSC with future potential in regenerative medicine.