_01.jpg)
_02.jpg)
NIDCD grants total more than $3.4 million over next five years
February 17, 2009
Chris Rorden
Two of the Arnold School’s most productive researchers are recipients of new National Institutions of Health R01 grants totaling $3.4 million.
The two grants will allow Julius Fridriksson and Chris Rorden to continue “very fruitful research collaboration” into the mysteries of how people recover from strokes and how the brain works to produce and understand speech.
Fridriksson and Rorden are associate professors in the Department of Communications Sciences and Disorders.
Julius Fridriksson
Additionally, Fridriksson is director of the department’s Aphasia Lab, which studies the relationships between brain damage and speech/language impairments. Rorden is team leader at the Neuroimaging Lab where he studies brain-behavior relationships.
The grants are both from the NIH’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD).
Fridriksson said the newest grant, worth $1.8 million over the next five years, will support groundbreaking research into understanding how the same areas of the brain used to produce speech also are important for understanding speech.
“It (the study project) pretty much breaks from conventional wisdom which suggests that we have one area of the brain for speech production and one area for speech comprehension,” he said.
Leonardo Bonilha
Much of the study will be done at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston where Dr. Leonardo Bonilha, a local neurologist, will join the research team.
“Without our collaboration with MUSC I don’t think this (project) would happen,” said Fridriksson, adding the study will involve about 200 research subjects.
The second R01 grant worth $1.6 million over five years will allow the USC researchers to examine the brains of normal persons and stroke patients.
“This grant is going to help us better understand normal brain function and how we can extrapolate that to understanding recovery and stroke,” Fridriksson said.
Approval of the R01 came on Jan. 23, the same day Fridriksson detailed findings of a similar study to an NIDCD advisory group.
Fridriksson said his earlier study found that people who suffer a stroke, but had healthy blood circulation in their brains before the stroke occurred, are the most likely to recover.
“It’s the first study to show a recordable link between brain changes and the outcome following treatment of stroke patients,” he told the panel.
Fridriksson said the study focused on how parts of the brain unaffected by a stroke, called residual brain fitness, related to recovery.
The studies could provide clues to improving treatment or therapy for stroke victims. South Carolina is among seven Southern states with the highest death rates from stroke, and about half of stroke victims in the Midlands are younger than 60.
