Translator: Ramtin Mehraram Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Since I was a child
there was a question that haunted me all the time:
'What makes us what we are?'
Okay - you may probably answer to this question by saying
that I used to be a weird child, and I might agree with you,
but I believe that this might be an interesting question.
What I am trying to say is: What is the key of our identity?
Someone may say: our physical appearance.
Well, that makes sense; that's how I would recognise any of you.
Someone else may suggest: the way we dress.
Well, that definitely reflects our personality.
However, I think that I found a more convincing answer
in the biology course in my high school,
and this answer made me even more curious to explore further.
Our identity is our brain.
Think about that!
Our brain rules the way we move, the way we talk,
the way we feel.
It preserves our memories.
It creates our thinking and also changes with us.
One year and a half ago I obtained a position as a PhD student
at the Newcastle Biomedical Research Centre.
This gave me the opportunity to discover more about how the brain changes
when we grow up, when we become elderly,
and in the unfortunate case, we get dementia.
Today, I am going to take you into a journey through history and mind,
and we will explore a new efficient way
to understand more about how the brain changes when someone has dementia
and how this can help millions of people worldwide.
But what is dementia? What do we know about dementia?
Did we always have the same knowledge about it?
Well, that's not the case. Let's travel 2,000 years back.
The ancient Greece - great minds such as Pythagoras or Hippocrates.
They could already notice a late stage in our lifespan
which involves some form of mental regression.
But it was thought to be just an unavoidable consequence of growing old.
Let's move forward: Middle Ages.
Unfortunately, Middle Ages were not proficient in terms of scientific progress
and nothing new has been discovered about dementia,
until the eighteenth century,
when thanks to the development in the research of anatomy,
they could see for the first time
the brain atrophy associated with this mental regression.
However, at that time, if anyone showed some form of mental illness,
they were just considered mad and confined into asylums,
until the nineteenth century, when a scientist called Alzheimer
could see for the first time in the brain of a dead lady
that the disease which affects our thinking abilites and our memory
is associated with the presence of some plaques in our brain.
This is what today is known as Alzheimer's disease,
which I believe everybody in this room have heard of.
In fact, this is the most common cause of dementia.
However, one in 10 people with dementia are affected by a different form,
which has been discovered in the last century
by a Japanese psychiatrist called Kosaka.
This form of dementia
is caused by the build up of abnormal protein bodies in our brain.
These protein bodies are called Lewy bodies,
named after the scientist that found them first.
This form of dementia, which is called dementia with Lewy bodies,
causes problems with our movement and our walking.
But, at the very beginning,
its symptoms are very similar to the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.
To make a diagnosis, the most common way doctors make a diagnosis
is to ask the person who shows the symptoms to run some questionnaires.
The scores of these questionnaires
are somehow related to the severity of the symptoms,
and eventually provide a diagnosis.
But as you may guess, the similarity between Azlheimer's disease dementia
and dementia with Lewy bodies in their symptoms
makes it really hard to get a right diagnosis,
and a wrong diagnosis means wrong treatment.
For better diagnosis,
doctors can also rely on some biological damages caused by the disease
to tell the difference.
To date, few technologies have been used to assess how the brain changes
when someone has dementia.
For example, thanks to the magnetic resonance imaging,
also known as M-R-I,
they could see that when someone has dementia with Lewy bodies,
some parts of the brain become thinner than usual.
However, this and other technologies are still too expensive, time consuming,
or uncomfortable for the patients.
Is there any better way to get a right diagnosis
at the early stages of dementia?
This is the main question I am trying to answer with my research.
Now, I want you all to think of your own brain
as a powerful computer.
A computer uses electricity to work out the text we type on the keyboard,
the pictures we see on the screen, or the videogames we play.
It is not just a block of iron and plastic.
It is made of many independent parts,
which relate to each other through a bunch of colored cables.
In a very similar way, your brain uses electricity
to work out all the information collected from the surrounding world.
We may call it electrical activity.
Our brain is not just a sponge of gray matter.
It is made of many independent areas or regions
which talk to each other through wired pathways.
We can find slow as well as fast pathways,
and the electricity flows through them and connects our brain.
At this point, we can make the hypothesis
that due to the disease which causes dementia,
these electrical pathways might be somehow affected, right?
But to prove this hypothesis, we would need some way
to record the electrical activity of the brain.
Is there any way to do that?
Well, the answer to this question
is a technology called electroencephalography, or E-E-G.
EEG basically consists of a wearable cap made of small objects
called electrodes,
which continuously keep track of the electrical activity of the brain
from the scalp.
Compared with other technologies, EEG is way easier, cheaper, and faster.
So, recently, scientists tried to assess
how these electrical pathways in the brain are affected
when someone has dementia, using the EEG.
Interestingly, they found that when someone has dementia,
all these electrical pathways are somehow broken down.
This means that the electricity cannot flow properly
as it is supposed to do,
and the information cannot be properly worked out
by the different areas of the brain.
But the most interesting finding is that in dementia with Lewy bodies,
the fastest pathways are even more damaged.
This means that the information is slowed down all over the brain,
and this leads to all the symptoms associated with dementia with Lewy bodies,
such as temporary loss of consciousness, visual hallucinations, sleeping problems.
As you can see, thanks to an easy and convenient tool such as EEG,
we could understand so much about how the brain deals with dementia.
However,
there is still a big unsolved question:
Where is the source of these abnormal changes
inside the brain?
With my research, I aim to build a strategy to find the position,
the strength, and the size of this source,
I believe that the way to do that might be closer than we think.
Now, how many people in the audience have got a smartphone today? Hands up!
Yes, this is exactly what I expected!
So, if you open the smartphone, if you open the maps on your smartphone,
the first thing you should be able to see is something like this:
a blue dot showing your current position.
High technology, isn't it?
Have you ever wondered how that works?
Basically, there are some objects called satellites which rotate around the earth.
Each satellite collects some information about the position of your smartphone.
Eventually, your smartphone gathers all this information,
and gathers its own position, which is yours.
Now, you're probably wondering why I'm suddenly talking about smartphones -
I'm not trying to sell you anything.
But what I'm trying to say is that we can use the same strategy
to find our brain source.
In our case, the satellites will be the electrodes of the EEG cap.
The smartphone will be the brain source we're looking for.
If all this will work, thanks to a powerful tool such as EEG,
we will get way closer to the source of the disease itself,
and this will be a strong contribution
in a near future
to find an efficient way to diagnose dementia,
to cure the people who are affected,
and eventually to repair this amazing computer that is our brain.
Thank you.
(Applause)