Tracy A. Butler
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Neuroscience
The brain has no conventional lymph vessels, so it relies on the slow movement and mixing of cerebrospinal and interstitial fluid, including the pathway known as the glymphatic system, to wash out waste proteins. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a leading cause of death and disability and raises the risk of later Alzheimer's disease, and one possible link is that injury damages this waste-clearing plumbing.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
traumatic brain injury
glymphatic system
cerebrospinal fluid
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2029
What they work on
- Confirm, using additional complementary measurement methods, the preliminary finding that traumatic brain injury reduces brain cerebrospinal and interstitial fluid clearance, including the glymphatic pathway, in patients imaged within 14 days of injury.
- Test whether lower post-injury fluid clearance is associated with worse cognitive, functional, and symptomatic recovery, using detailed clinical assessment and blood TBI biomarkers in patients recruited from New York City emergency rooms.
- Measure brain amyloid-beta with positron emission tomography as soon as possible after moderate or complex-mild TBI and again one year later, to track how rapidly deposited amyloid appears and resolves.
- Test the hypothesis that an individual's brain fluid clearance rate predicts the one-year change in brain amyloid-beta, linking poor clearance and persistent amyloid to the elevated Alzheimer's risk that follows head injury.
- Compare PET and MRI measures of fluid flow, mixing, and clearance, including a PET method developed by this group that tracks tracer egress from the ventricles, to determine the relative accuracy and predictive value of each.
More about the research
This project uses human brain imaging to measure fluid clearance soon after a head injury and to follow what happens to the toxic proteins that injury releases.
Why it matters
Traumatic brain injury affects millions of people worldwide and increases the risk of later neurodegenerative disease. Showing whether impaired brain waste clearance tracks with poor recovery and with lingering amyloid deposits could identify a treatable target: therapies that boost clearance might improve recovery after head injury and lower later dementia risk. Because the same clearance-to-amyloid process unfolds over decades in Alzheimer's disease, watching it compressed into a year after injury may also inform Alzheimer's research more broadly.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jonathan McConathy
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Neuroscience
Acquire amyloid-PET and tau-PET scans, which detect hallmark Alzheimer's protein deposits, and MRI scans from UAB Alzheimer's Disease Research Center participants using a simultaneous PET/MRI system.
Yunjie Tong
Purdue University, IN·Neuroscience
Measure how strongly changes in cerebral blood volume, the amount of blood in the brain, are coupled to cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) movement during both wake and sleep states.
Robert Marr
Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, IL·Neuroscience
Test how pharmacologically altering the activity of neprilysin and NEP2, enzymes that degrade amyloid-beta, changes acute pathology and recovery in the days after traumatic brain injury in APP-humanized mice.
The school
Weill Medical College of Cornell University: 35 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 59 research doctorates a year.
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