MSU student’s work appears in scientific journal – may lead to a new approach to treating brain trauma.

Few first-year medical students see their name appear in a major journal for research that may lead to a new approach to treating brain trauma.

But Pam Fry Durling has done just that.

By CAROL FLAHERTY, MSU News Service

http://bozemandailychronicle.com/articles/2004/07/23/news/02msustudentbzbigs.txt

The work, results of which were published recently in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences," is drawing attention in both the popular and scientific press because it suggests that treatment after a brain injury needs to take into account how the brain reacts to trauma over time.

The brain, it now appears, reacts differently in the first minutes after injury than it does hours later.

"This is really important and is going to shake the field up a little bit," Mary Ellen Michel, of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, wrote in the April issue of "Science News."

Durling put in thousands of hours of work on the project as an undergraduate at Montana State University.

She has since completed her first year of medical school at MSU as part of the WWAMI program, which educates medical students for their first year on campuses outside Washington. Durling will head for Seattle to attend her second through fourth years at the University of Washington Medical School.

As an undergraduate, Durling worked with Charles Paden, who usually has two to four undergraduate students working in his lab on projects related to his research into head trauma.

Anat Biegon at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California asked Paden for student help on a research project.

"I said I had a great undergraduate working in the lab," said Paden.

Durling went to California to learn the techniques needed for the project, including making brain sections and performing audioradiography to quantify the density of rodent brain receptors at specified times after trauma.

Previous researchers had found that neurons became over-excited after trauma and then died due to that over-stimulation. But attempts to prevent this "excitotoxicity" using drugs that blocked excitation failed in clinical trials.

The data that Durling collected showed that a brief period of excessive excitation was in fact followed by a much longer period during which brain activity was depressed. This suggests that what worked soon after trauma was counter-productive once brain activity decreased.

Now researchers will know what to look for as they fine-tune their treatments in humans and should be able to find a short window of opportunity for one kind of treatment soon after trauma, and a different treatment that works later on.

But it took a massive amount of work to document the changes in brain activity over time.

"Pam worked all summer in Berkeley, then brought the work back here for her senior year and the summer after," said Paden.

Durling said that "the prep work was fun. The analyzing work was very tedious and took a long time."

That Durling was included as an author on the paper with lead researcher Biegon, Paden and others "was due to her dedication and hard work," said Paden.

Durling said curiosity helped.

"It kept me very busy. It was difficult to do sometimes. But I was so curious. I think that kept me going. I didn’t want to influence the data, so I never looked at any trends. It was a surprise right up to the end."