Posterior Cingulate

Abstract

News

1. Steven Platek, Drexel University in Philadelphia and others, Contagious yawning and the brain, "...Here, using fMRI, we show that viewing someone yawn evokes unique neural activity in the posterior cingulate and precuneus...", PubMed, 2005 May.
   • "...When the students watched the videos [of people yawning], what reacted was the part of the brain that scientists believe controls empathy - the posterior cingulate, located in the brain's middle rear..." Full story: www.philly.com: Explaining the yawn: Bored? Weary? Empathetic?, 2006 January 9.
   • "...When the students watched the videos, the part of the brain which reacted was the part scientists believe controls empathy - the posterior cingulate, in the brain's middle rear.", The Sidney Morning Herald, Researchers waking up to why we yawn, 2006 January 19.
2. "[Joshua] Greene and his colleagues found 'that brain areas associated with emotion and social cognition (medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate/precuneus, and superior temporal sulcus/temperoparietal junction) exhibited increased activity while participants considered personal moral dilemmas, while 'cognitive' brain areas associated with abstract reasoning and problem solving exhibited increased activity while participants considered impersonal moral dilemmas.', Reason Online, Morality on the Brain. Cerebral scans for right and wrong, 2006 January 27.
3. "The hoarders also show less activation than the healthy subjects in the posterior cingulate, an area involved in spatial orientation, memory and emotion." Woman Possibly Suffering From Hoarding Causes Accident, Due To ...
4. "... detected non-significant trends toward smaller volumes of the posterior cingulate gyrus and caudate nucleus among the high-symptom patients." AAN: Brain Changes in Gulf War Vets Match Up with Functional Problems.
5. "[...] Tom Farrow and colleagues at the University of Sheffield tracked it down to 'left superior frontal gyrus, orbitofrontal gyrus and precuneus'. [...] and some forgiveness in the posterior cingulate gyrus." Place to think, a critical report of human brain mapping as "Improbable research" by Marc Abrahams (Ig Nobel organizer) published in The Guardian 7. august 2007.

Scientific articles

1. Nofzinger and others, Am J Psychiatry, Functional Neuroimaging Evidence for Hyperarousal in Insomnia
2. The British Journal of Psychiatry, Temporal course of auditory hallucinations
3. "...There were also decreases in rCBF [in subjects 60-69 years of age compared to subjects 50-59 years of age] in the left anterior cingulate gyrus, bilateral posterior cingulate gyri, bilateral medial frontal gyri, bilateral subcallosal gyri, left superior temporal gyrus, and left cuneus..." Full story: AJNR: Effects of Aging on Regional Cerebral Blood Flow Assessed By Using Technetium Tc 99m Hexamethylpropyleneamine Oxime Single-Photon Emission Tomography with 3D Stereotactic Surface Projection Analysis
4. "Bipolar disorder patients exhibited increased activity in the temporal cortex, specifically to emotional go/nogo conditions, as well as in the orbitofrontal cortex, the insula, the caudate nuclei, and the dorsal anterior and posterior cingulate cortices when inhibiting emotional stimuli compared with neutral stimuli." Fronto-Striatal Overactivation in Euthymic Bipolar Patients During ...
5. "Quantitative analyses used the distribution volume ratio (DVR) of frontal cortex, parietotemporal cortex, posterior cingulate,..." Visual Assessment Versus Quantitative Assessment of 11C-PIB PET and 18F-FDG PET for Detection of Alzheimer's Disease
6. "Glucose metabolism declined over time in the bilateral precuneus and posterior cingulate gyri [...]". One-Year Change in Cerebral Glucose Metabolism in Patients With Alzheimer's Disease, J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci 16:488-492, November 2004.
7. "Predominant hypometabolism was found in the anterior cingulate gyrus of 6 patients, the middle cingulate gyrus of 2 patients, and the posterior cingulate gyrus of 4 patients." Focal Brain Glucose Hypometabolism in Patients with Neuropsychologic Deficits after Diffuse Axonal Injury
8. "Global values for FDDNP-PET binding (average of the values for the temporal, parietal, posterior cingulate, and frontal regions) were lower in the control group than in the group with mild cognitive impairment (P<0.001), and the values for binding in the group with mild cognitive impairment were lower than in the group with Alzheimer's disease (P<0.001)." PET of Brain Amyloid and Tau in Mild Cognitive Impairment
9. "Activation foci in the posterior cingulate and in the inferior parietal lobe were correlated with both anxiety and depression scales (P < 0.001)." Positron Emission Tomography Reveals Correlations between Brain Metabolism and Mood Changes in Hyperthyroidism
10. "Differences Between Patients With Schizophrenia and Healthy Comparison Subjects in the Default Mode": "Comparison subjects show greater activation in the precuneus, posterior cingulate, and cingulate gyrus." Aberrant "Default Mode" Functional Connectivity in Schizophrenia.
11. "...Regions of interest (ROIs: whole brain [WB], hippocampus [Hip], entorhinal cortex [EC], posterior cingulate cortex [PCC], inferior parietal lobule [IPL], and [...] reductions were found in all FAD subjects compared with controls [...] PCC (20%)" Hypometabolism Exceeds Atrophy in Presymptomatic Early-Onset Familial Alzheimer's Disease
12. "Healthy comparison subjects showed covariation in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (Brodmann's area 8) and outside the volume of interest in the posterior cingulate gyrus (Brodmann's area 31)." Paralimbic and Medial Prefrontal Cortical Involvement in Neuroendocrine Responses to Traumatic Stimuli

Collector

Finn Årup Nielsen is a Post Doc at the Informatics and Mathematical Modelling at the Technical University of Denmark on a grant from the Lundbeckfonden to CIMBI. He is also attached to Neurobiology Research Unit at the Copenhagen University Hospital Rigshospitalet.