The fALFF appears to be a noninvasive measure that characterizes spontaneous BOLD fluctuations and shows stronger amplitudes in the slow-3 subband of patients with NOE relative first-seizure subjects and healthy controls. A larger study population with follow-up is required to determine whether fALFF holds promise as a potential biomarker for identifying subjects at increased risk to develop epilepsy.

Sensorimotor integration, the translation between acoustic signals and motoric programs, may constitute a crucial mechanism for speech. During speech perception, the acoustic-motoric translations include the recruitment of cortical areas for the representation of speech articulatory features, such as place of articulation. Selective attention can shape the processing and performance of speech perception tasks. Whether and where sensorimotor integration takes place during attentive speech perception remains to be explored. Here, we investigate articulatory feature representations of spoken consonant-vowel (CV) syllables during two distinct tasks. Fourteen healthy humans attended to either the vowel or the consonant within a syllable in separate delayed-match-to-sample tasks. Single-trial fMRI blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) responses from perception periods were analyzed using multivariate pattern classification and a searchlight approach to reveal neural activation patterns sensitive to the processing of place of articulation (i.e., bilabial/labiodental vs. alveolar). To isolate place of articulation representation from acoustic covariation, we applied a cross-decoding (generalization) procedure across distinct features of manner of articulation (i.e., stop, fricative, and nasal). We found evidence for the representation of place of articulation across tasks and in both tasks separately: for attention to vowels, generalization maps included bilateral clusters of superior and posterior temporal, insular, and frontal regions; for attention to consonants, generalization maps encompassed clusters in temporoparietal, insular, and frontal regions within the right hemisphere only. Our results specify the cortical representation of place of articulation features generalized across manner of articulation during attentive syllable perception, thus supporting sensorimotor integration during attentive speech perception and demonstrating the value of generalization.

Autoantibodies against ion channels are the cause of numerous neurologic autoimmune disorders. Frequently, such pathogenic autoantibodies have a restricted epitope-specificity. In such cases, competing antibody formats devoid of pathogenic effector functions (blocker antibodies) have the potential to treat disease by displacing autoantibodies from their target. Here, we have used a model of the neuromuscular autoimmune disease myasthenia gravis in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) to test the therapeutic potential of a new blocker antibody: MG was induced by passive transfer of pathogenic acetylcholine receptor-specific monoclonal antibody IgG1-637. The effect of the blocker antibody (IgG4Δhinge-637, the hinge-deleted IgG4 version of IgG1-637) was assessed using decrement measurements and single-fiber electromyography. Three daily doses of 1.7 mg/kg IgG1-637 (cumulative dose 5 mg/kg) induced impairment of neuromuscular transmission, as demonstrated by significantly increased jitter, synaptic transmission failures (blockings) and a decrease in the amplitude of the compound muscle action potentials during repeated stimulations (decrement), without showing overt symptoms of muscle weakness. Treatment with three daily doses of 10 mg/kg IgG4Δhinge-637 significantly reduced the IgG1-637-induced increase in jitter, blockings and decrement. Together, these results represent proof-of principle data for therapy of acetylcholine receptor-myasthenia gravis with a monovalent antibody format that blocks binding of pathogenic autoantibodies.