{"id":167,"date":"2018-01-09T18:24:17","date_gmt":"2018-01-09T18:24:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/gallagher-lab\/?p=167"},"modified":"2018-01-09T18:24:17","modified_gmt":"2018-01-09T18:24:17","slug":"saving-memories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/gallagher-lab\/2018\/01\/09\/saving-memories\/","title":{"rendered":"Saving Memories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Saving Memories<\/a><\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a>Ansh Bhammar<\/strong> (left) spent a couple of summers during high school as a recreational therapy volunteer at a VA hospital in his native Boston. He specifically worked with Alzheimer\u2019s patients, engaging them in a range of activities: playing catch, taking walks, reading, doing puzzles.<\/p>\n

\u201cWorking with veterans, I would hear some incredible stories,\u201d the junior neurology major says. But there was a sadness to it all as well. These patients\u2014most in their 70s and 80s\u2014had profound cognitive impairment. \u201cThey wouldn\u2019t remember me or my face, and I would always have the same conversation with the same people,\u201d Bhammar says. \u201cThey\u2019d be happy to see a new face even though they\u2019ve been seeing me every day for two months.\u201d And Alzheimer\u2019s\u2014now the sixth leading cause of death in the country\u2014is degenerative and fatal.<\/p>\n

This interest in seniors, combined with a long fascination with the human brain\u2014what Bhammar calls, \u201ca universe saturated with mysteries\u201d\u2014has him aiming for a career in geriatric neurology. And it\u2019s also why he\u2019s doing research in Professor Michela Gallagher<\/strong><\/a>\u2019s lab in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences<\/a>, which is focused on neurocognitive aging. His research is made possible with support from the Phyllis F. Albstein Fund.<\/p>\n

In the lab, Bhammar no longer works with seniors, but instead, with rats standing in for humans. The rodents are separated into three categories: young rats, older rats that don\u2019t show any cognitive impairment, and older rats that do show impairment. (The rodents are subject to a memory test of sorts in a pool of water to determine their cognitive state.) It\u2019s Bhammar\u2019s job to examine the thinly sliced brains of all three types of rats looking for differences across the groups.<\/p>\n

What to look for? Well, our brains operate with a balance between neural excitation (a lot of synaptic activity) and inhibition (reduced synaptic activity). Might age-related cognitive impairment be the result of an excitation\/inhibition imbalance? Gallagher\u2019s most significant finding to date suggests as much, as she\u2019s shown that excessive hyperactivity in one section of the hippocampus may account for memory loss. Bhammar examines brain slices that have been dyed to make the presence of certain genes stand out\u2014genes whose presence in small amounts or greater amounts model whether a section of the brain was subject to excitation or inhibition. So far, preliminary findings indicate that brains of older rats without cognitive impairment show increased neural inhibition.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is all a hypothesis at this point, but in order to maintain successful cognition you may need to increase the amount of inhibition in certain areas of the brain,\u201d Bhammar says. \u201cWhen those ratios go haywire\u2014that\u2019s what could lead to cognitive impairment. But we\u2019ve got a long way to go before we can actually conclusively say that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

(from \u201cField Notes\u201d, Johns Hopkins University Arts and Sciences Magazine. Fall 2017)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Saving Memories Ansh Bhammar (left) spent a couple of summers during high school as a recreational therapy volunteer at a VA hospital in his native Boston. He specifically worked with Alzheimer\u2019s patients, engaging them in a range of activities: playing catch, taking walks, reading, doing puzzles. \u201cWorking with veterans, I would hear some incredible stories,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":155,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/gallagher-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/gallagher-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/gallagher-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/gallagher-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/155"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/gallagher-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/gallagher-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170,"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/gallagher-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions\/170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/gallagher-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/gallagher-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/gallagher-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}