Gait impairment and Freezing of gait (FOG), lead to falls, injury (even death), loss of independent living, and are common in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s Disease (PD), affecting over 7 million people worldwide. The incidence of neurodegenerative diseases increases with age and as the population lives longer, the societal consequences of FOG, will be very significant.
Project Summary/Abstract Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) refractory to treatment is marked by failure of fear extinction and its biological substrate, amygdala reactivity to trauma reminders13,14. Decades of research have clarified the neuronal mechanisms coordinating fear extinction and consolidation15. Fear cells and extinction cells in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) alter their firing rate based on the nature of the stimulus and the influence from the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the ventral hippocampus (vHPC)16,17.
For many years brain-computer interfaces (BCI's) have been explored as a means of restoring communication to patients with Locked-In Syndrome (LIS), a devastating and often irreversible neurological condition in which cognition is intact but nearly all motor output from the brain is interrupted, effectively cutting off communication with the outside world. To date non-invasive BCI's (e.g.
PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT Impaired consciousness during seizures has a major negative impact on quality of life for people with epilepsy. Consequences include risk of motor vehicle accidents, drowning, poor work and school performance, and social stigmatization. Impaired ictal/postictal arousal may also compromise breathing leading to sudden unexpected death in epilepsy.
PROJECT SUMMARY . There are numerous clinical needs for a technology that can modulate nervous system activity noninvasively and focally, with clinically-relevant spatial and temporal precision, with a robust and predictable mechanism of action, and that could act on any of the varied modes of neural signaling: excitatory, inhibitory, and neuromodulatory. We have developed exactly such a technology by combining focused ultrasound and drug delivery nanotechnology.
Project Summary / Abstract Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome (LGS) is a devastating form of childhood onset epilepsy with cognitive dysfunction and very frequent generalized onset seizures (GOS) often leading to injury. Driven by the lack of effective therapies and the demonstrated safety and efficacy of brain-responsive stimulation for medically intractable focal onset seizures (FOS), this study will test whether brain-responsive neurostimulation of thalamocortical networks (RNS-TCN) is a feasible strategy to treat LGS.
Project Summary Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that leads to both motor and non-motor symptoms. While there is as yet no cure for PD, medical and surgical therapies have been developed that effectively target the motor symptoms of PD. Non-motor symptoms are far more disabling for patients, precede the onset of motor symptoms by a decade, are more insidious in onset, have been less apparent to clinicians, and are less effectively treated.
SUMMARY ABSTRACT More than 1.2 million people in the United States have a spinal cord injury (SCI), and each year there are 10,000 new cases. In the last few years, we have shown that neuromodulation using epidural stimulation of the lumbosacral spinal cord can activate latent neural circuits and restore voluntary movement, standing and stepping in individuals with chronic SCI. One participant in this study also reported gains in bladder function following training with spinal cord epidural stimulation.
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Respiratory failure after spinal cord injury (SCI) impairs the health of the injured patients, and respiratory failure is the leading cause of death in patients with SCI. Treatment of respiratory failure consists of mechanical ventilation, in which a mechanical pump is used to facilitate air exchange with the lungs. Mechanical ventilation is invasive, costly, limiting, and carries with it a high risk of complications and death.
