Efficacy of intravenous Dexamethasone in treatment of acute migraine headache: A randomized clinical trial running title

Abstract Introduction: Migraine is characterized by unilateral and pulsatile headache with or without aura. There are various treatments of migraine attack. One of them is intravenous (IV) Corticosteroids which is used in status migrainous. The aim of this study is comparison of the efficacy of I.V Dexamethasone with intramuscular (I.M) Methadone in improvement of migraine attacks. Materials and Methods: This study was a controlled double-blind randomized clinical trial on all patients whom referred to emergency room with diagnosis of migraine attack. The patients were randomized in four groups. Groups I and II received intravenous 8 mg Dexamethasone, while groups III and IV received intramuscular 10 mg Methadone. Thereafter all of them were evaluated after 2, 4 and 6 hours. Results: One-hundred and eighty one patients were evaluated; 107 patients were treated with IV Dexamethasone and 74 patients with IM Methadone. One-hundred and three of 107 patients (96.2%) had complete or significant improvement whereas 63 of 74 patients (85%) whom received IM Methadone had similar improvement (P= 0.01). Conclusion: Our study showed that treatment of acute migraine headache by using intravenous Dexamethasone is more effective than Methadone

High-resolution imaging of fluorescent whole mouse brains using stabilised organic media (sDISCO)

Optical tissue clearing using dibenzyl ether (DBE) or BABB (1 part benzyl alcohol and 2 parts benzyl benzoate) is easy in application and allows deep-tissue imaging of a wide range of specimens. However, in both substances, optical clearing and storage times of enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP)-expressing specimens are limited due to the continuous formation of peroxides and aldehydes, which severely quench fluorescence. Stabilisation of purified DBE or BABB by addition of the antioxidant propyl gallate efficiently preserves fluorescence signals in EGFP-expressing samples for more than a year. This enables longer clearing times and improved tissue transparency with higher fluorescence signal intensity. The here introduced clearing protocol termed stabilised DISCO allows to image spines in a whole mouse brain and to detect faint changes in the activity-dependent expression pattern of tdTomato

Deconvolution of light sheet microscopy recordings

AbstractWe developed a deconvolution software for light sheet microscopy that uses a theoretical point spread function, which we derived from a model of image formation in a light sheet microscope. We show that this approach provides excellent blur reduction and enhancement of fine image details for image stacks recorded with low magnification objectives of relatively high NA and high field numbers as e.g. 2x NA 0.14 FN 22, or 4x NA 0.28 FN 22. For these objectives, which are widely used in light sheet microscopy, sufficiently resolved point spread functions that are suitable for deconvolution are difficult to measure and the results obtained by common deconvolution software developed for confocal microscopy are usually poor. We demonstrate that the deconvolutions computed using our point spread function model are equivalent to those obtained using a measured point spread function for a 10x objective with NA 0.3 and for a 20x objective with NA 0.45.</jats:p