Browsing by Author "Pollock, Michael"

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    Burden of hereditary transthyretin amyloidosis on quality of life
    (Wiley, 2019-08) Yarlas, Aaron; Gertz, Morie A.; Dasgupta, Noel R.; Obici, Laura; Pollock, Michael; Ackermann, Elizabeth J.; Lovley, Andrew; Kessler, Asia Sikora; Patel, Pankaj A.; White, Michelle K.; Guthrie, Spencer D.; Medicine, School of Medicine
    INTRODUCTION: Hereditary transthyretin (hATTR) amyloidosis is a progressive, degenerative disease, with peripheral neuropathy, cardiomyopathy, and other clinical manifestations. In this study we examine the impact of hATTR amyloidosis on quality of life (QOL). METHODS: Neuropathy-specific QOL, measured with the Norfolk QOL-Diabetic Neuropathy questionnaire, was compared between patients with hATTR amyloidosis and patients with type 2 diabetes, whereas generic QOL, measured with the 36-item Short Form Health Survey version 2 (SF-36v2), was compared between patients with hATTR amyloidosis, the general population, and patients with chronic diseases. RESULTS: Neuropathy-specific QOL for patients with hATTR amyloidosis was nearly equivalent to that of patients with type 2 diabetes with diabetic neuropathy accompanied by a history of ulceration, gangrene, or amputation. Generic QOL was worse than that seen in the general population, with physical functioning worse than that for patients with multiple sclerosis and congestive heart failure. DISCUSSION: Patients with hATTR amyloidosis show significant burden on QOL, particularly in physical functioning. Muscle Nerve 60: 169-175, 2019
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    Suppressing fear in the presence of a safety cue requires infralimbic cortical signaling to central amygdala
    (Springer Nature, 2024) Ng, Ka; Pollock, Michael; Escobedo, Abraham; Bachman, Brent; Miyazaki, Nanami; Bartlett, Edward L.; Sangha, Susan; Psychiatry, School of Medicine
    Stressful events can have lasting and impactful effects on behavior, especially by disrupting normal regulation of fear and reward processing. Accurate discrimination among environmental cues predicting threat, safety or reward adaptively guides behavior. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) represents a condition in which maladaptive fear persists in response to explicit safety-predictive cues that coincide with previously learned threat cues, but without threat being present. Since both the infralimbic cortex (IL) and amygdala have each been shown to be important for fear regulation to safety cues, we tested the necessity of specific IL projections to the basolateral amygdala (BLA) or central amygdala (CeA) during safety recall. Male Long Evans rats were used since prior work showed female Long Evans rats did not acquire the safety discrimination task used in this study. Here, we show the infralimbic projection to the central amygdala was necessary for suppressing fear cue-induced freezing in the presence of a learned safety cue, and the projection to the basolateral amygdala was not. The loss of discriminative fear regulation seen specifically during IL->CeA inhibition is similar to the behavioral disruption seen in PTSD individuals that fail to regulate fear in the presence of a safety cue.