The Chemosensory Responses in Blind, Deaf and Healthy Humans
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1
Dokuz Eylul University, Faculty of Medicine Biophysics Dept., Türkiye
The current study has the scope of assessing the electrophysiological responses in the sensory disabled (blind and deaf) and healthy humans. The motivation behind the study is to address the neural capacity assignment and usage in the limitation of one sense. In this prospect our group has added olfactory modality to visual, auditory, and tactile modalities, with 64 channel EEG (Neuroscan Synamps 64) using EMISU (Embedded Interactive Stimulus Unit) device. The initial phase has been applied over 13 deaf (7F; mean age 14.6±1.01), 14 blind (5F; mean age 14.43±1.09), and 10 control subjects (4F; mean age 16.6±2.72). Olfactory and trigeminal stimulants were delivered using OM2s as 2-phenylethyl alcohol (PEA) and CO2, respectively. The baseline airflow was adjusted to 8 mL/min, 80% relative humidity and 36 C0. The duration of stimuli was 200 ms and ISI was 25 sec. In order to rule out auditory cues white noise (80 dB) administered through headphones. SCAN 4.0 and sLORETA have been used to assess the responses and localizations.
The preliminary analysis efforts of olfactory and trigeminal were focused on (A) time-amplitude and (B) localization processes. Accordingly (A) point to three major peaks: N1 as around 350, P1 at around 500 and N2 as around 900 ms. (B) The sLORETA localizations of CO2 responses were mostly distributed around BA 6,7,11 in controls whereas the responses of deaf also incorporated BA 39 and 40 (more towards auditory cortex). The blind localization showed BA 19 (towards visual cortex) besides BA6, BA7. The three groups also included cingulate gyrus. The grand average PEA responses had sLORETA localization of BA11 for blinds, BA6, 8, 10 for deaf and BA7, 8,9,32 for healthy individuals at this initial stage.
The comparative analysis of chemosensory responses may allow a further understanding of sensory organization and plasticity. Moreover the dynamic responses may allow further functional connectivity insight within the brain using olfactory modality.
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
The study is supported by TUBITAK 108S113 and DEU.2008.KB.SAG.019. Authors appreciate support of Ugras Erdogan and Onur Bayazit.
References
Keywords:
blind,
Chemosensory responses,
CO2,
Deaf,
PEA,
trigeminal
Conference:
Human Chemosensation 2010, Dresden, Germany, 2 Dec - 4 Dec, 2010.
Presentation Type:
Presentation
Topic:
Human Chemosensation 2010
Citation:
OZGOREN
M,
Guducu
C and
Oniz
A
(2011). The Chemosensory Responses in Blind, Deaf and Healthy Humans.
Front. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
Human Chemosensation 2010.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2011.85.00003
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Received:
27 Jan 2011;
Published Online:
03 May 2011.