Temple research finds an ADHD drug could help individuals with ap

Temple research finds an ADHD drug could help individuals with aphasia regain language abilities.

When ABC journalist Bob Woodruff was injured while reporting in Iraq in 2006, he suffered severe head injuries that caused him to lose his ability to recall and produce common words — a condition called aphasia. Today, Woodruff has recovered most of his language skills thanks to intensive behavioral therapy — reading and repeating words and sounds.

“The standard of care for patients with aphasia has always been and will always be speech/language therapy, but a new area is opening up that looks at what drugs can be used in combination with therapy to enhance recovery from brain damage and help the brain repair itself,” said Gerry Stefanatos, D.Phil., an associate professor of communication sciences and disorders in the College of Health Professions. “We’re looking at the mechanism of how this combination works — it’s underlying effect on patients with aphasia.”

In research presented at the International Neurological Society this month, Stefanatos found that dextroamphetamine (D-AMPH), a drug commonly used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, improved the processing of speech among those suffering from Broca’s aphasia and the similar Anomic aphasia.

“Improving a patient’s attention and working memory may allow them to better focus and process information during therapy sessions,” said Stefanatos. “Attention is critically important for learning and relearning skills, and could be helpful in forging new neural pathways in the brain.”

Stefanatos's research explores the nature and basis of neurogenic language disorders integrate neuropsychological/neurolinguistic approaches to the study of brain function with advanced functional neuroimaging techniques, such as brain electrical source localization and functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Stefanatos’ recent study looked at the use of D-AMPH in ten aphasia patients. All were also given a placebo for comparison purposes. In each condition, participants were asked to make decisions about different types of speech sounds (vowels, consonant-vowels) and complex tones. Their brain’s electrical response to each was recorded via an electroencephalogram (EEG).

Those who took the D-AMPH had a strong reaction to the sounds — even to consonant-vowel sounds, which are more often difficult for individuals with aphasia to process.

“This tells us that D-AMPH may help the left hemisphere of the brain regain the ability to perform its functions,” said Stefanatos. “Understanding why the drug is having this effect allows us to start to think about how to tailor treatments to make them more effective or explore alternative drugs or drug combinations.”

Stefanatos said he and his team chose to look at this particular drug because in patients with ADHD it has been shown to stimulate the release of dopamine and epinephrine, which help in attention and learning. But he notes that some people aren’t good candidates for this particular drug.

“Now that we have a rudimentary understanding of why the drug may work to enhance the results of therapy, our next step is to look at dose effects and perhaps other drugs with more favorable side effect profiles,” said Stefanatos.

With collaborators from the departments of Radiology and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Stefanatos will next study functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore the effects of D-AMPH on cerebral metabolism and where in the brain of individuals with aphasia it has the greatest effect.

Other authors on this study are Andrew DeMarco at Temple University, Robert Segal at McGill University in Quebec, and Arthur Gershoff, M.D. and Y. Ieuji of the Moss Rehab Stroke and Neurological Diseases Program, part of the Albert Einstein Healthcare Network in Philadelphia. This work was funded by grants from the National Institute of Health and the Pennsylvania Department of Health.

His interdisciplinary work on acquired epileptiform aphasia and regressive autism resulted in passage of a congratulatory resolution (HR 307) by the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1997, in recognition of his scientific and clinical contributions. He has extended his work in this area to studies seeking to understand brain plasticity and the changes that accompany recovery from stroke and other cerebrovascular insults to the brain. Among the studies currently under way, he is examining the extent to which pharmacologic and behavioral interventions promote adaptive functional and structural changes in brain organization and enhance recovery of function. He received his bachelor's degree in Psychology from McGill University in Montreal and his doctorate in Clinical Neuropsychology from the University of Oxford in England. While based at the MRC Neuropsychology Unit (situated in the Oxford University Department of Clinical Neurology), he developed a special interest in the problems of individuals with acquired aphasia and in the inexplicable failure to acquire language experienced by some children (Specific Language Impairment). In collaboration with colleagues at the University Laboratory of Physiology, he developed novel methods of recording brain electrical responses in humans to rapidly changing complex sounds. He applied this steady-state auditory evoked responses paradigm in studies directed to understanding the neurobiological basis of speech perception problems seen in developmental language disorders and some forms of acquired aphasia in children.

Stefanatos has written numerous articles published in scientific journals and has authored several chapters in textbooks in the field of neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience. These have covered conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, Asperger's disorder, developmental language disorder, and aphasia. His editorial responsibilities have included reviewing research papers for "Brain and Development, “Brain and Cognition, Neuropsychologia, Biological Psychiatry, Child Neuropsychology, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, the Journal of Developmental and Learning Disorders, Neuropsychiatric Genetics, Neurocase, Clinical Neuropsychologist, and Journal of Neuropsychological Rehabilitation. He has also served on scientific review committees for the National Institute of Health.

Stefanatos has received funding from the National Institute on Deafness and Communicative Disorders, the National Institute of Child Health and Development, the Pennsylvania Department of Health and the Albert Einstein Society.

Marie Bernard

Marie Bernard to Speak at Women's Health Research Symposium at Temple March 26

Director of the National Institute on Aging is a leading expert on medical care for an aging population 

MEDIA CONTACT: Paul Statt, Paul Statt Communications, 413-244-7456, paulstatt@paulstatt.com

PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 9--Marie Bernard, the Deputy Director, National Institute on Aging (NIA), will deliver the keynote address on "Healthy Aging" at the fifth annual Women's Health Interdisciplinary Research Symposium at 8 a.m on Thursday, March 26 in Mitten Hall at Temple University, as part of week-long celebration of research at the university.

The daughter of two physicians, Bernard earned her medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and completed her residency at Temple University Hospital, where she was chief resident. She held several positions at Temple's School of Medicine, starting as an instructor in medicine, then serving as an associate professor in internal medicine, director of medical clinics and assistant admissions dean. In 1990, the University of Oklahoma recruited her to build its geriatrics education and research programs. Until her move to the NIA, she was the founding director of Oklahoma's Reynolds Department of Geriatric Medicine, which launched in 1997. At the time, it was only the third department of geriatrics in the nation. In addition to founding and directing the department, Bernard also served as Associate Chief of Staff (ACOS) for Geriatrics and Extended Care at the Oklahoma City Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Bernard's research, which she has pursued in addition to administrative and other roles, has focused on nutrition and functioning in older adults, with particular emphasis on ethnic minorities. She has published widely on geriatric care, nutrition, medication issues and health problems among minorities. She was a member of the NIA's National Advisory Council on Aging, and chaired its Minority Task Force. She has also been a member of the American Geriatrics Society's Board of Directors, President and Chair of the Board of the Association of Directors of Geriatric Academic Programs, and a member of the Institute of Medicine committee that wrote the groundbreaking "Retooling for an Aging America: Building the Health Care Workforce," released in April. Among the committee's key findings: The nation's healthcare workforce is too small and unprepared to meet the needs of its rapidly growing population of older adults.

The annual Women's Health Interdisciplinary Research Symposium is taking place as a part of Research Week, from Monday, March 23 through Friday, March 27, at Temple University. Sponsored by the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research and Strategic Initiatives, Research Week offers five days of lecturers, colloquia, presentations and performances, culminating on Friday, March 27 with an address by 2008 Nobel Chemistry Laureate Martin Chalfie, who discovered green fluorescent proteins.   

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David Post

In 1787, Thomas Jefferson, then the American Minister to France, had the "complete skeleton, skin & horns" of an American moose shipped to him in Paris and mounted in the lobby of his residence as a symbol of the vast possibilities contained in the strange and largely unexplored New World. Inspired by his Jeffersonian intellectual curiosity about Jefferson's eccentric efforts, David Post, professor of law in the Beasley School of law at Temple University and one of the nation's leading Internet scholars, asked why--and what Jefferson might have to say in the 21st Century.  In Search of Jefferson's Moose ($27.95, Oxford University Press, New York 2009) is a pithy, colorful exploration of the still mostly undiscovered territory of cyberspace--what it is, how it works, and how it should be governed.

What law should the Internet have, and who should make it? What are we to do, and how are we to think, about online filesharing and copyright law, about Internet pornography and free speech, about controlling spam, and online gambling, and cyberterrorism, and the use of anonymous remailers, or the practice of telemedicine, or the online collection and dissemination of personal information? How can they be controlled? Should they be controlled? And by whom? Post presents the Jeffersonian ideal--small self-governing units, loosely linked together as peers in groups of larger and larger size--as a model for the Internet and for cyberspace community self-governance. Deftly drawing on Jefferson's writings on the New World in Notes on the State of Virginia , Post draws out the many similarities (and differences) between the two terrains, vividly describing how the Internet actually functions from a technological, legal, and social perspective as he uniquely applies Jefferson's views on natural history, law, and governance in the New World to illuminate the complexities of cyberspace.

Human Smoke

Nicholson Baker's book Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (Simon & Schuster, 2008) has gotten very bad press.

The angry reviews are defensive. Anne Applebaum in The New Republic writes

"And the reader, both of The Da Vinci Code and Human Smoke, is duly flattered. Read Brown's book and you, all by yourself, can decide whether Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene! Read Baker's book and you, all by yourself, can decide whether World War II was worth fighting! You too can get the facts and make up your mind! And never mind that the facts have been chosen selectively, even randomly, by writers who do not understand the context in which they originally appeared, and indeed have deliberately tried not to understand it. Brown and Baker are not "experts," after all. They are, to put it politely, artistes."

I really don't understand the cult of the expert any more than I do the newer cult of the amateur. But as a college graduate, I am offended by the notion that I am not qualified to decide all by myself, if the Second World War was good or Jesus was married. The latter question is meaningless, but the moral status of war, and of any particular war, is something about which every American voter should have an opinion. An informed opinion.

Nicholson Baker didn't supply me with my opinion, but he did inform. Thanks.

You need a communications consultant…

You need a communications consultant…

..because you’re a smart person running a worthy organization, and yet, the world either ignores or misunderstands what you do. If you don’t create and maintain your own image, someone else will. That may be an individual or a group with a different, or even an opposing mission. A mission-driven organization has a responsibility to make its mission understood. You may be trying to reach a number of different audiences—some sympathetic, some hostile, all skeptical.

· The Media

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Your task is to communicate with all of them.

What can a communications consultant do for you?

· Listen and learn what you do

· Develop, refine and maintain you message or image

· Strategize about the best ways to communicate that message

· Provide editorial assistance in your written work, in print and on the Web

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· Talk to the rest of the world about what you do.

What kinds of writing can you expect from Paul Statt Communications?

· Research

· Writing issue backgrounders and press releases for the media

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Paul S. Statt is a senior communications officer, advisor, and journalist with a 15-year record of accomplishment in the development, implementation, and maintenance of integrated communications products. A skilled writer and researcher with experience in higher education, online and print media, and information technology, Statt can offer

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Seeing in the Blind Spot

Every driver knows—or should know—about the “blind spot,” that part of the road that you just can’t see in any of your car’s rear-view mirrors, the spot that all too often hides a semi-tractor trailer full of hazardous wastes passing you at 70 miles an hour on a crowded turnpike.

R. Andrew Hicks, an associate professor of mathematics at Drexel University, has a better solution than a quick turn of the head and a yelp of surprise. He has created a slightly and elegantly curved mirror that provides drivers with a 45 degree field of view on the driver’s side. A flat mirror provides less than 20 degrees. The difference is dramatic.

Flat mirrors do not provide a wide enough field of view. Trucks and buses make use of spherical mirrors, which broaden the field, but increase the distortion of the image. The passenger-side mirror on a car, the one with the worrisome note that “objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear,” also trades a wider field for a distorted view.

Hicks has been working on creating very wide fields of view, in the new field of “omnidirectional vision,” sometimes also called panoramic vision, which has been developed to help robots to “see.” A mobile robot might use a camera with an extremely wide-angle “fish-eye” lens or with curved mirrors mounted in front of a standard lens. Omnidirectional vision provides a very large field of view.

Curved mirrors can provide the same kind of panoramic views—such as often seen in CCTV security cameras. Hicks was designing such mirrors for robots as a postdoctoral fellow at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1995. He also was learning a lot about the problems of building them. The theoretical design of a curved mirror that has a wide and undistorted view is a “problem of classical optics,” Hicks says. That elegantly drawn curve, however, was until recently impossible to translate into a physical mirror. “The tricky part is that the machines that could actually build a practical design didn’t exist before 2000. So nobody really explored making such a mirror.”

Hicks can now make and demonstrate such a mirror, but he can’t sell it: U.S. law prohibits a curved mirror on the driver’s side. (It is allowed in Europe and Japan and as an add-on in the U.S.) Until that can be changed, he still advocates, as your driver-ed teacher did, an occasional quick glance over the shoulder.

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18th-Century Architecture: 21st-Century Technology

All the students in the Digital Media Program at the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design learn how to create the latest in computer graphics and animations. But the students working at Independence National Historical Park with Glen Muschio, the director of the program, are also getting a crash course in American history. Philadelphia may be America's most historic city, but much of what the tourist sees has been reconstructed over the centuries. Drexel University researchers are beginning to uncover what 18^th-century Philadelphia was really like—and to create an interactive computer model of it that anyone can explore. Muschio, Chris Redmann, assistant professor of digital media and their students have been recreating exact 3-D replicas of colonial-era structures. The project brings together faculty and students from the computer science department in the College of Engineering, the culture and communication department in the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Information Science and Technology and the School of Education.

The collaborative 3-D Colonial Philadelphia
will serve as a research and production center for models, animations and interactive media—a repository for "virtual artifacts" of colonial life, in searchable databases for researchers and scholars. The Dexter House was recreated based on information regarding the house foundation obtained at the site and a survey of buildings from the time period fitting the style of the house and buildings created by the Dexter House's carpenter.

"We want this to be a resource for research, production, use and evaluation of digital assets for studying U.S. history," says Muschio. The project is part Second Life, part social history, part SimCity, part computer science and part teaching tool. "What we hope to do is create a 3-D environment for teaching and learning about colonial American history in schools, at historic sites and on the Web" he adds.

One of the first homes recreated in their virtual 18^th-century Philadelphia is a two-story brick house located in the vicinity of Fifth and Arch Streets that belonged to James Oronoko Dexter, a prominent and free African-American. Dexter is believed to have held meetings at his house for the creation of the first independent African American church. The original house was demolished in the 19^th century, but recent archeological digs brought to light information about the house and site.

Muschio and his students have built the exterior and interior spaces of the home with historical accuracy and will scan artifacts found from the dig to restore the interior to its 18^th- century look. Another building, the Whitall House, home of wealthy Quakers, which still stands in Woodbury, N.J. opposite Philadelphia International Airport, has been another model.

The future of the project includes regional sites and events that were historically significant to the development of the city's culture and economics. "3-D Colonial Philadelphia will evolve as technology advances and as we too develop cutting- edge technology to move the field forward," says Muschio. He wants to recreate the 18th-century city and its economic ecosystem, eventually populating its buildings with digitized characters, or avatars, who will show visitors the objects found there, and tell them about the significance of the site—like virtual tour guides. "As AI [artificial intelligence] capabilities develop, we hope that the interaction will get to the state where we can really do this on a big scale and people can get involved in role-playing games. That's where we're headed. Right now, were building the spaces in a photo-realistic way."

"We are working with the computer science department, which is interested in creating algorithms that will allow them to work with the National Park Service to virtually reconstruct the Dexter artifacts, based on the remnants that were uncovered," said Muschio. "We're also working with information-science technology to create databases so we can get a handle on all of this stuff, because we hope to make this available to other researchers in other cities who might not have the types of resources we have in terms of window types, brick face, things like that."

Chris Redmann, an architect and 3-D animator with an interest in historic preservation, is directing the construction of the 3-D virtual environments. He's teaching his undergraduate and graduate students to use the Historic American Building Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) as guides for reconstructing 3-D models of historic buildings. These digital assets will be used to construct virtual period buildings that are known to have stood on specific plots, but are undocumented in terms of detailed descriptions. The faculty and students will also research insurance, tax and deed records noting physical descriptions and positioning of structures.

The resulting database of colonial Philadelphia doors, windows, brick faces and other common features could be dropped into a scene or a row of houses quickly. Whole blocks, which might have sketchy historical records at best, could then be recreated with some measure of authenticity.

Working from HABS blueprints, undergraduate student Brian Gadomski, has already built an archive of 18th-century house doors and windows. "I'm bringing them into 3-D and I'm tracing them in the computer, and building, based on the original drawing, a geometry that matches exactly with those," he says. "It's a process that's relatively simple but will allow us to create a data base of doors and windows that can be used eventually in the complete Colonial Philadelphia."

"Using this method, it will not be possible to know what every specific house in the city looked like," said Muschio. "Detailed treatments will be reserved for historically significant structures that are well documented."

"I actually learned a lot about the Dexter house while doing it," said Chester Cunanan, a graduate student in digital media. "How they had the first meetings there that eventually led to the first African American church in Philadelphia and how the Quakers worked with that."Cunanan says that he has learned more than he expected. "You have to learn about the history of the place to build the place properly, and then the history catches you at that point. So when it starts, maybe you weren't totally into the history, but when it ends, you're not only interested in the place, but the history and the place. The history pushes you on—it's the impetus that drives you after the fun of playing with a new toy wears off."

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