June 21, 2017 by Beth Newcomb Brain scans, left to right, taken one, two, seven and 12 days after a traumatic brain injury show how an injury can worsen for weeks after the initial trauma. Credit: Andrei Irimia After a traumatic brain injury, when do the first indications of possible long-term complicationsincluding dementiaappear and is it possible to stave them off? A five-year R01 grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke totaling more than $1.5 million will support one facet of brain injury research through 2021. The project will examine the effects and prognoses of small bleeds, or microhemorrhages, in the brain following traumatic brain injury in older adults. "We want to understand whether these microhemorrhages are benign or whether they can cause serious problems for patients down the line," said Andrei Irimia, an assistant professor at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology who uses sophisticated neuroimaging techniques to understand the effects of brain injuries and improve the quality of life of sufferers, especially older adults. Only 2 percent of R01 grants go to researchers under the age of 35. Irimia said the grant reflects not only the increase in attention paid to the topic of … Continue reading →

Traumatic brain injury is in great need of better therapies. Its victims are often young, including athletes and those in the military. Bruce Chandler May, a physician from Santa Barbara, says he has found such a therapy. Hes the president and CEO of a company thats developing the therapy, Inflammatory Response Research, Inc. Mays in San Diego for the BIO International biotechnology convention to meet potential partners in government and private industry. I ran into May by serendipity Sunday evening when we were were both passengers on a Lyft ride. Heres his story in question and answer format. Q: How did you make this discovery? A: I practice trauma medicine at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, and I discovered synergy between two existing molecules, levocetirizine, which is the top antihistamine in the world, and montelukast, an asthma drug which is the top leukotriene modulator in the world. We plan to combine the two molecules as a First Response injectable for the military. It will be the first new therapeutic in over 30 years, a safe and effective treatment for traumatic brain injury and blast injury. Q What stage of development is this in? A: We have established proof of concept for … Continue reading →

Hospital emergency rooms treat more than 170,000 children each year for sports-related traumatic brain injuries, including concussions, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. What do parents and coaches need to know about sports concussions in order to protect their kids and players?A commentary by Dr. Christopher Giza, director of theUCLA Steve Tisch BrainSPORT program, about sports, concussions and neuroscience appears in the June 21 online edition ofNeuron. Here, Giza, a national leader in concussion research, offers a game plan for where concussion research is headed: Todd Cheney/UCLA Dr. Christopher Giza 1.Accurate diagnosis is essential. Concussions are the most complex injury to the most complicated organ in the human body, said Giza, who is also a professor of pediatrics, neurology and neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLAand theUCLA Mattel Childrens Hospital. There is no magic-bullet, catch-all test for diagnosing the disorder. Giza said that although finding a single reliable test will be unlikely, doctors hope that blood work, brain imaging and electrical tests will improve concussion diagnosis and help them monitor recovery. A physicians diagnosis is often informed by the patients reported symptoms, he said. Yet not every symptom that surfaces after a … Continue reading →

June 22, 2017 Credit: Wikimedia Commons Considering the brain's network of activity, rather than just individual regions, could help us understand why some brain injuries are much worse than others, according to a study published PLOS Computational Biology by Maxwell B. Wang, Julia Owen, and Pratik Mukherjee from University of California, San Francisco, and Ashish Raj from Weill Cornell Medicine. The human brain displays an astonishing range of responses to injury, depending on its location. This is conventionally considered a result of the fact that each brain region has a specific functional role. However, there is increasing evidence that the brain's regions do not operate in isolation but as a network or 'connectome.' Therefore, to understand the effect of injury, we must look not just for localized changes but network-wide changes caused by the disruption of network connections. The authors used a combination of Diffusion-Tensor MRI and ideas from graph theory to investigate patterns in the white matter network architecture of the brain, and how these change due to injury. They built on previous work by Dr. Raj, in the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine, and colleagues that showed that simple models of networks … Continue reading →