By studying neurons in the brain's motor control region, J&J researcher Bernd Meurers recently identified several new genes that appear to play a role in Parkinson's disease.
Fibers running between two regions in the left side of the brain--one a speech center near Wernicke's and Broca's, the other a motor control region for the tongue and larynx--were about 30% less tightly packed among those who stuttered, the team reports in the 3 August issue of The Lancet.
In their study, the researchers destroyed the motor control region in mice and then tested their singing abilities.
Studies in songbirds show that the neural circuits in the brain that are responsible for producing song and for generating vocal variability both converge on a motor control region called the robust nucleus of the arcopallium (or RA for short).
This hypothesis, which is an element of some forward models [21], is based on the assumption that vocal motor control regions in human frontal lobe route an efference copy of motor commands to temporal lobe auditory cortex in a field-specific manner [22], [23], [24].
Ataxia occurs in several of the polyQ diseases, such as the spinocerebellar ataxias, due to the neuronal loss in the cerebellum and other motor control regions.
In the rhesus monkey, most superior aspects (BA 9) have strong connections with motor control regions (i.e., lateral premotor cortex, supplementary motor cortex, and cingulate motor area) but, at most, few connections with the rhinal cortex.
Speech and tool use are also likely to depend on exquisite motor control underpinned by these regions, notes Simon Fisher, a neurogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who led the latest study.
Our results are in line with recent proposals of a wide-spread cortical motor control hierarchy, where temporoparietal regions seem to evaluate visuomotor congruence and thus possibly ground a self-attribution of movements, the LOTC likely processes early visual prediction errors, and the aIPS computes action goal errors and possibly corresponding motor corrections.
The purpose of this study is to examine the reliability, internal consistency, and clinical importance of 3 clinical tests that analyze motor control mechanisms of the lumbopelvic region in patients with nonspecific LBP.
It is possible that increased connectivity between reward-related regions and regions involved in motor control could be maladaptive in at-risk youth.
