Exposure to medical radiation does not increase a person’s risk of getting cancer, and the long-held belief that even low doses of radiation, such as those received in diagnostic imaging, increase cancer risk is based on an inaccurate, 70-year-old hypothesis, according to a new published review.

Journal Reference:

Prefrontal cortical control of a brainstem social behavior circuit.

Tamara B Franklin, Bianca A Silva, Zina Perova, Livia Marrone, Maria E Masferrer, Yang Zhan, Angie Kaplan, Louise Greetham, Violaine Verrechia, Andreas Halman, Sara Pagella, Alexei L Vyssotski, Anna Illarionova, Valery Grinevich, Tiago Branco, Cornelius T Gross.

Nature Neuroscience, 2017; DOI: 10.1038/nn.4470

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nn.4470

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.4470.html

Abstract:

The prefrontal cortex helps adjust an organism's behavior to its environment. In particular, numerous studies have implicated the prefrontal cortex in the control of social behavior, but the neural circuits that mediate these effects remain unknown. Here we investigated behavioral adaptation to social defeat in mice and uncovered a critical contribution of neural projections from the medial prefrontal cortex to the dorsal periaqueductal gray, a brainstem area vital for defensive responses. Social defeat caused a weakening of functional connectivity between these two areas, and selective inhibition of these projections mimicked the behavioral effects of social defeat. These findings define a specific neural projection by which the prefrontal cortex can control and adapt social behavior.

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