In January of 2011, I posted a blog essay on the world of Connectomics.
Cellular nerve circuit mapping, or connectomics, began as a new field of brain science in 2007.
In the 2011 blog, a Dr. Jeff Lichtman of Harvard was noted as having just received the backing of the National Institute of Health (NIH) along with a $40 million dollar grant to fund The Human Connectome Project.
An update on progress with the HCP appears in the July issue of Neurosurgery, the official journal of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. Neurosurgery is published by Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins which is part of Wolters Kluwer Health.
The David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles is now involved with connectomics work.
The Human Connectome Project entails the complete mapping of all of the neural cell circuitry pathways within the human brain. Think of it as “Map Quest for your Brain.”
Imagine, in just a few short years, your neurologist, being able to call up a detailed three-dimensional map of of all of the major, secondary and minor back road neural circuit routes within your Hippocampus and Entorhinal cortex. Why those areas do you ask?
Because these two areas of your brain are crucial to the development, encoding and handling of new memories and the dispersal of that information out to other distant regions of the brain for storage along with later access and retrieval. They also represent the ground zero area of your brain where Alzheimer’s Disease first initiates its’ bombing campaign of destruction. It starts there for everyone who is eventually diagnosed with AD.
Imagine having, in advance, one or two early life baseline scans of your Hippocampus and Entorhinal cortex. One done, say when you were in elementary school, and a second one completed when you were, perhaps age eighteen. Developmental landmark ages.
Armed with this data, your neurologist could visualize with precision the exact neural pathways either at future risk or presently under attack to then protect or defend with medications now being developed or on the drawing boards.
Or taking it a step further, how might this mapping technology offer, for the first time, the possibility of a blueprint and the glimmer of hope for reconstructing or reconstituting a mid or late stage Alzheimer’s patient’s brain: to the point of perhaps restoring that patients’ ability to form and encode new memories again and reconnect with areas of the brain the disease had cut off?
For me, this work with Connectomics represents exciting prospects for not only folks suffering from AD, but all other forms of dementia type diseases as well as people who have also suffered traumatic brain injuries from gun fire, accidental falls and automobile collisions.
This is definitely an area of scientific research that I will continue to monitor and blog on.
Connectomics links are found at:
ScienceDaily. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120702152652.htm
Brain modeling techniques gallery. http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/gallery/.
Jeff Dodson
July 8th 2012
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