Pamela Billig Mello Carpes

Federal University of Pampa | UNIPAMPA · Health Sciences - campus Uruguaiana/RS/Brazil

In Brazil, University teaching is generally a responsibility of professors who are required to postgraduate training, generally master's and Ph.D. degrees, in specific areas, depending on the discipline taught. Rarely is there a concern with teacher pedagogical training in stricto sensu courses – when there is, it does not usually include neuroscie...

A divulgação da neurociência, destacando-se pelo estudo do cérebro e suas funções, ganha importância na educação e sociedade. Através de esforços contínuos, como palestras e o uso inteligente das mídias sociais, a neurociência se aproxima do público. Estudantes universitários, especialmente os envolvidos com o Programa POPNEURO da Universidade Fede...

We aimed to investigate whether the consumption of Egg White Hydrolysate (EWH) acts on nervous system disorders induced by exposure to Cadmium (Cd) in rats. Male Wistar rats were divided into (a) Control (Ct): H2O by gavage for 28 days + H2O (i.p. − 15th − 28th day); (b) Cadmium (Cd): H2O by gavage + CdCl2 − 1 mg/kg/day (i.p. − 15th − 28th day); (c...

Neuroeducation is characterized as a subarea of neuroscience that involves comprehending the teaching and learning processes and relating them to neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neuropsychology. The inclusion of some aspects of the neuroscience of learning in teachers' and students' formation, applying them in teaching-learning environments, con...

Objective: The Manihot esculenta Crantz (Cassava) is a typical South American plant rich in nutrients and energetic compounds. Lately, our group has shown that non-pharmacological interventions with natural antioxidants present different neuroprotective effects on oxidative balance and memory deficits in AD-like animal models. Here, our objective...

Aversive memory extinction comprises a novel learning that blocks retrieving a previously formed traumatic memory. In this sense, aversive memory extinction is an excellent tool for decreasing fear responses. However, this tool it's not effective in the long term because of original memory spontaneous recovery. Thus, searching for alternative strat...

Background Synaptic Transmission (ST) is a content of Physiology courses in which students frequently experience learning difficulties. Intervention Here, we evaluated the impact of using The Synaptic Board Game (SBG), an educational game created to assist in ST teaching-learning, on students’ knowledge. Methods Sixty-eight students were divided...

Worldwide, parenthood remains a major driver for the reduced participation of women in the job market, where discrimination stems from people’s biases against mothers, based on stereotypes and misconceptions surrounding the vision of motherhood in our society. In academia, parenthood may be perceived as negatively affecting scientists’ commitment a...

We created the "3D synaptic puzzle" (3Dsp) as an educational resource for the physiology teaching of synaptic transmission (ST). We aimed to apply and evaluate the use of 3Dsp. For this, we divided 175 university students from public and private universities into two groups: (i) control (CT; students that were only exposed to ST traditional class o...

Maternal deprivation (MD) leads to long-lasting memory deficits. Conversely, maternal exercise could potently modify the offspring's cellular machinery. Here, we tested whether starting to run or reducing the intensity of running during pregnancy can protect prepubertal female offspring against MD-induced memory deficits. Female rats were divided i...

Understanding how the brain function to promote learning shouldn't just be interesting to neuroscientists, but especially to teachers. From the moment that teachers understand the processes of learning and memory, this knowledge can help their teaching practice. Here, we report the 10th edition of the course "Neuroscience Applied to Education", off...

Research investigating how the brain develops and learns profoundly impacts education. Understand the brain mechanisms responsible for learning and memory and factors that influence them, such as age, environment, emotions, and motivation, can transform educational strategies by contributing to the development of programs that optimize learning. In...

Worldwide, parenthood remains a major driver for the reduced participation of women in the job market, where discrimination stems from people's biases against mothers, based on stereotypes and misconceptions surrounding the vision of motherhood in our society. In academia, parenthood may be equally perceived as negatively affecting scientists' comm...

Background The preventive role of muscular strength on diminishing neuroinflammation is yet unknown. In this study, the role of the prophylactic muscular strength exercise was investigated in order to verify whether it would diminish cognitive alterations and modify the antioxidant intracellular scenery in an animal neuroinflammatory model in of th...

BACKGROUND: The Biomechanics Olympic Games (BOG) is a teaching method (see Carpes et al., Adv Physiol Educ. 2017;41(3):436-440) to facilitate biomechanics education. It has been conducted over the past 9 years and replicated in other universities, successfully reducing failing grades. AIM: Therefore, a recurrent question is whether the BOG reduces...

A desigualdade de gênero na ciência e os fatores responsáveis por esse fenômeno têm sido cada vez mais discutidos e pesquisados. Mundialmente, a participação das mulheres na ciência é menor que a dos homens, diminuindo ainda mais nas posições de poder, em cargos de liderança e de tomada de decisão. Embora, no Brasil, estejamos caminhando para um nú...

Strategies for improving memory are increasingly studied, and exposure to a novel experience can be an efficient neuromodulator. Novelty effects on memory depend on D1-family dopamine receptors (D1Rs) activation. Here, we evaluated the novelty effect on memory persistence of Wistar rats and investigated the contribution of D1Rs and their signaling...

From the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we expected that people, especially women, caring for children, elderly, people with disabilities or other family members, would be the most impacted in academia; data proved this to be the case. This issue is central to the long-standing problem of low female representation in science, since women across al...

Alzheimer's disease affects thousands of people worldwide. Alternatives aiming to prevent the disease or reduce its symptoms include different physical exercise configurations. Here we investigate the potential of concurrent exercise to prevent recognition memory deficits in an Alzheimer's disease-like model induced by the hippocampal beta-amyloid...

"Basic Concepts in Neurophysiology" was a 3-wk online course developed during six synchronous meetings combined with asynchronous activities. We proposed an active learning course that used free online platforms to teach physiology during a period in which undergraduates were not in classrooms or taking online classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic....

Memory extinction has been used in behavioral therapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorders. It was demonstrated that memory reactivation before extinction could facilitate this process. However, the mechanisms involved are still unclear. Here, we investigated the participation of two regions of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), the in...

Background: The preventive role of muscular strength in the diminishing of a neuroinflammation is yet unknown. In this study, the role of the prophylactic muscular strength exercise was investigated, whether it would diminish cognitive alterations and modify the antioxidant intracellular scenery in an animal neuroinflammation model of the CA1 regio...

The workshop entitled “Physiology teaching in the Problem-based learning (PBL) context” was developed in two different times and contexts, in Brazil during 2017 and 2018. The main goal was to show how PBL works and discuss different possibilities and strategies to include physiology education in this different context of non-traditional teaching, w...

Background: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by the accumulation of the amyloid-β peptide in the brain, leading to early oxidative stress and neurotoxicity. It has been suggested that physical exercise could be beneficial in preventing AD, but studies with multicomponent training are scanty. Objective: Verify the effects of multicompone...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is altering dynamics in academia, and people juggling remote work and domestic demands – including childcare – have felt impacts on their productivity. Female authors have faced a decrease in paper submission rates since the beginning of the pandemic period. The reasons for this decline in women’s pr...

In 2020 universities had to quickly implement remote education alternatives as a result of the social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To keep students engaged with the university, we implemented a teaching-learning model that relates physiology contents to the COVID-19 pandemic using online educational platforms. A 1-mo web course was prop...

Previously, we demonstrated that one single physical exercise session could positively modulate recognition memory persistence by D1/D5 activation. Here, we aim to investigate whether the effect of physical exercise on memory occurs due to the activation of both receptors, D1 and D5, or only one of them. Adult male Wistar rats were habituated on a...

Antioxidant supplementation and physical exercise have been discussed as strategies to minimize neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease (AD). We investigated the neuroprotective effects of strength exercise (StrEx) and green tea (GT) supplementation, combined or not, on memory impairments induced by β-amyloid characterizing an AD-like condition in...

A pandemia da COVID-19 se disseminou amplamente de forma substancial e impôs à sociedade uma nova forma de realizar suas atividades cotidianas, incluindo as atividades de ensino, pesquisa e extensão universitária. Dessa forma, professores e cientistas de todo o mundo, na tentativa de dar continuidade as suas atividades e adaptar-se ao distanciament...

As a result of the installation of the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 19) pandemic, online education has become an important teaching alternative, and new challenges about how to teach were found. Here we report our experience in offering an online course to review Human Physiology. We proposed synchronous and asynchronous activities using different...

O conhecimento básico sobre a neurociência é importante em diversos aspectos da vida, já que permite o entendimento de processos neurais presentes em nosso dia a dia, como a cognição e a aprendizagem. Para o professor, principal mediador da construção do conhecimento na sala de aula, o conhecimento desta temática é importante para facilitar sua prá...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the leading cause of dementia in the world, accounting for 50–75% of cases. Currently, there is limited treatment for AD. The current pharmacological therapy minimizes symptom progression but does not reverse brain damage. Studies focused on nonpharmacological treatment for AD have been developed to act on brain plastici...

While the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is altering academia dynamics, those juggling remote work and domestic demands, including childcare, have already felt the impacts on productivity. Female authors are facing a decrease in papers submission rates since the beginning of the pandemic period. The reasons for this decline in women p...

Previous researches showed that maternal deprivation (MD) leads to memory deficits that persist until adulthood. The hippocampus, an important brain structure involved in memory processes, receives dopaminergic afferents from other brain areas that modulate memory. Here we demonstrated that MD results in object recognition memory deficits that are...

Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative pathological process that causes memory loss and cognitive impairment. One of the pathological characteristics of Alzheimer’s disease is the amyloid-β protein aggregation on the brain. The regular practice of physical exercise is a consolidated strategy on the prevention of cognitive deficits;...

Antioxidant supplementation and physical exercise have been discussed as strategies to minimize neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We investigated the neuroprotective effects of strength exercise (StrEx) and green tea (GT) supplementation either combined or isolated on memory impairments induced by a β‐amyloid characterizing an AD‐like...

Memory extinction has been considered an interesting strategy for attenuating responsiveness to the original fear memory, and has been widely used on clinic to treat fear‐related disorders. However, exposure therapy tend to require a long and slow process of treatment and generally produce transient fear reduction that is often bound to the context...

Maternal deprivation (MD) causes cognitive deficits that persist until adulthood. Thereby, the environmental enrichment (EE) is widely used to increase brain plasticity. Here, pregnant female rats were used and their offspring were submitted to neonatal MD from post-natal day 1 to 10; after weaning the rats were submitted to EE. MD caused deficits...

Já é reconhecida a importância dos conhecimentos da neurociência para a sociedade. Estes conhecimentos, por ficarem restritos ao meio científico, muitas vezes não chegam à população em geral, e tampouco à escola, onde o entendimento do cérebro poderia contribuir para os processos de ensino-aprendizagem. Esta pouca divulgação científica acaba propic...

Diferentes estratégias têm sido propostas para melhorar o processo de ensino-aprendizagem em diferentes compos. Uma opção para otimizar o aprendizado, aumentando o envolvimento dos alunos e proporcionando discussões em grupo, é o uso de jogos educacionais (JE). Neste estudo, nós avaliamos as percepções dos alunos sobre o uso do JE como uma ferramen...

During the neonatal period, the brain is susceptible to external influences. Exposure to stressful events during this phase of life influences brain development and impacts adult life. In animals, the maternal deprivation (MD) model is effective in mimicking stress in the early stages of development. In contrast, physical exercise seems to be able...

Previously we demonstrated that a single physical exercise session promotes the persistence of object recognition (OR) memory and this effect involves the activation of the noradrenergic system. Here, using adult male Wistar rats (3 months old) we confirm that an aerobic single physical exercise session (30 min of treadmill running at an intensity...

Aversive memory is essential for survival, but in some situations its exacerbation can be potentially dangerous. There are several ways to modulate memory, among them, through stress-related hormones physiological release or administration of exogenous substances analogous to them. Recently, our group shown that a chronic treatment with a low dose...

Introdução: No cotidiano diário somos cada vez mais expostos a realização de tarefas simultâneas, em uma condição de dupla tarefa. Nessas situações dizemos que há a interferência de uma tarefa sobre outra. A dupla tarefa pode influenciar o tempo para respostas motoras, o que pode ser um limitante para ações físicas em idosos. Objetivo: Determinar o...

Métodos ativos de ensino têm sido adotados na formação de profissionais de diferentes áreas, estimulando o pensamento crítico e, dessa forma, favorecendo a tomada de decisão rápida e eficiente. O uso de casos clínicos em disciplinas da área da saúde é um exemplo. No entanto, a aplicação dessa ferramenta tem ocorrido principalmente em disciplinas cl...

Here we described two activities related to Women in Science: one main conference and one symposium, both developed during the Annual Congress of the Brazilian Physiological Society, which were held within the XXXIII Annual Meeting of the Federation of Brazilian Experimental Biology Societies, from September 3-6, 2018, in Campos do Jordão (SP/Brazi...

The generalization of aversive memory can be defined as the phenomenon in which a situation similar to (but distinctive from) a previous aversive event triggers an avoidance response. This phenomenon has been suggested to play a role in several psychological disorders. In this study, we investigate the effects of novelty on the generalization of fe...

Aerobic exercise induces neuroprotection, but few studies investigated whether strength training has similar potential. Here we examine whether effects of strength training differ from those of running training concerning cognitive symptomatology, oxidative stress and cholinergic status in a model of AD-like cognitive impairment induced by intrahip...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by the presence of amyloid-β (Aβ), oxidative damage and neuronal degeneration, which, together with other pathological events, promote progressive memory loss and cognitive decline. Non-pharmacological strategies have been study to provide some protection against the development of AD. Considering that phys...

Aluminum (Al), which is omnipresent in human life, is a potent neurotoxin. Here, we have tested the potential for Egg White Hydrolysate (EWH) to protect against changes in cognitive function in rats exposed to both high and low levels of Al. Indeed, EWH has been previously shown to improve the negative effects induced by chronic exposure to heavy m...

Os avanços da neurociência na área da educação têm contribuído para modificar o cenário do ensino-aprendizagem entre alunos e professores. O ensino de assuntos que relacionam o sistema nervoso com o cotidiano vivenciado desperta nos alunos um maior interesse e motivação sobre essa ciência. Esse trabalho relata uma ação do programa de extensão POPNE...

Resumo: O ensino de ciências pressupõe um conjunto de diferentes símbolos e formas de comunicação, por conta disso, torna-se questionável um esquema educacional baseado num único formato representativo. Conforme apontam programas internacionais de avaliação e as nossas diretrizes curriculares, o processo para aprender ciência envolve um desafio rep...

February 11th is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. To mark this day, research centers and universities were invited by the Spanish Neuroscience Association to organize a symposium. Twenty-five centers in Spain participated in the event, with the intent of giving visibility to the existing problem of the scarcity of women compared...

Physiology education research aims to investigate teaching-learning aspects and methods specifically applied to physiology teaching and learning. In this paper exploring Brazilian research public data and information from the Brazilian Physiological Society Teaching Committee, we investigated the status of this research topic (physiology education)...

Here we investigate the neuroprotective role of green tea (GT) when cafeteria diet (CAF) is associated with a model of β-Amyloid (Aβ) injection that induces cognitive impairments related to Alzheimer disease (AD). Wistar male rats were supplemented with GT, CAF, or GT plus CAF for 8 weeks before intra-hippocampal injection of Aβ peptide (2 μL of Aβ...

Fear generalization is defined as the transferring of fear experienced during a traumatic event to safe conditions resembling or not the traumatic event. It has been related to several psychological disorders. Here we set out to determine whether novelty exposure can be effective to avoid fear generalization. We evaluated the effect of a novelty ex...

A criação de estratégias que modifiquem o modelo clássico de ensino e facilitem a aprendizagem é um desafio para professores. A fisiologia, enquanto ciência básica, necessita de abordagens que permitam a construção de conhecimentos essenciais aos profissionais da saúde e estimulem o interesse dos estudantes nos conteúdos trabalhados em aula. Diante...

What would be the impression of physiology students if a physiology professor were to enter the classroom and tell the class that he or she is going to use infrared thermography (IRT)? How many students would know thermographic applications and their association with human physiology? IRT has become popular in different fields, such as engineering,...

Yacon is an Andean plant used as food and medicine; it is rich in phenolic compounds with several activities described. Thus, we investigated the neuroprotective effects of the leaves and roots of yacon in β-amyloid (Aβ)-induced neurotoxicity in rats. Wistar male rats were supplemented with extracts of the leaves or roots of yacon for 14 d before i...

A compreensão de aspectos gerais acerca da organização e do funcionamento do sistema nervoso é importante, uma vez que traz diversos benefícios para uma melhoria na qualidade de vida da população em geral. Este texto tem a finalidade de relatar a organização e o impacto de um conjunto de ações de divulgação neurocientífica realizadas junto à comuni...