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- Title
Cortical activation in children with congenital toxoplasmosis during auditory stimuli.
- Authors
Bertachini, A. L. L.
- Abstract
Objectives: We aimed to verify the most effective auditory stimuli for cortical activation in early treated children with congenital toxoplasmosis (CT) compared to typical children. Material: children aged up to three months who were diagnosed with congenital toxoplasmosis through the using the Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) method in which they detected the presence of IgG and IgM antibodies. These children are coming from the Congenital Toxoplasmosis Control Program of Minas Gerais, Brazil, from 2016 to 2018. The control group was composed by typical children whose families agreed to participate in the research. The treatment for these children was based on medical evaluation and indication with sulfadiazine, pyrimethamine and folinic acid. Children with other associated conditions such as prematurity, syndromes, hearing loss and other infections were excluded. The research was approved by the local ethical committee and all families signed a "free and informed consent form" to participate in the study. Methods: We performed all measurements with a continuous-wave (CW) near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) system (NIRScout, NIRx Medica Systems). Our optical probe allowed 84 channels that covered the whole head, including frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital lobes. The experimental protocol was block-designed with six blocks. Each block had one period of stimulation that varied from 10 to 12 seconds and a resting period of 10 seconds. Each child performed four different auditory stimuli: mother's voice with child-directed prosody, unknown voice with child-directed prosody, recorded voice without child-directed prosody, and mother's voice during reading. We process and analyzed all data with MatLab homemade codes. The preprocessing included removal of channels with low signal-to-noise ratio, motion artifact correction, and bandpass filtering. To verify which brain regions were recruited during each task, we performed General Linear Model analysis with an adaptive hemodynamic response function. Finally, we applied Wilcoxon rank-sum test to compare results across groups. Results: We performed NIRS on 61 children with an average age of 54 days, with a minimum age of 17 and a maximum of 94 days. The CT group was composed by 38 and the control group by 23 children. In the control group, among the stimuli there were more channels activated during the mother's reading and the unknown voice with child-directed prosody when compared to the recorded voice without child-directed prosody (p=0.0280, p=0.0476, respectively). There was no difference between the mother's voice with child-directed prosody and the recorded voice without child-directed prosody (p=0.2296). In the group of children with CT, there was no statistically significant activation difference between the different stimuli (>0.05). These results may suggest that, among the evaluated group, children with CT presented less ability to discriminate the stimuli when compared to typical children. In the comparison between the group of children with CT and the control group, for recorded voice without child-directed prosody stimulus, there was greater activation in the control group (p=0.0296; Ratio 3.3626). There was no significant difference in the comparison of groups for the other stimuli. A more diffuse pattern of activation was identified in the CT group when compared to the control group. One hypothesis for this finding is the presence of cortex calcifications in children with congenital toxoplasmosis, which may recruit more cortical areas for sensory processing. Conclusions: In this study, we identified that typical children had greater cortical activation during mother's reading and unknown voice with child-directed prosody. Among children with congenital toxoplasmosis, there was no activation difference between stimuli and there was a more diffuse activation pattern. This study provides a basis for future research to explore the functional role of brain activity in children with CT.
- Subjects
POLAND; TOXOPLASMOSIS treatment; AUDITORY cortex physiology; AUDITORY perception; CONFERENCES &; conventions; EARLY intervention (Education); ACOUSTIC stimulation; CHILDREN
- Publication
Journal of Hearing Science, 2022, Vol 12, Issue 1, p131
- ISSN
2083-389X
- Publication type
Article