Aging Brain Initiative Seminar Series with Dr. Patrick Purdon
Description
Our understanding of aging and development in humans has advanced significantly through the use of non-invasive imaging methods that have characterized structural and functional changes in the brain during these processes. Neural circuit dynamics, and oscillations in particular, also play a crucial role in aging and development, but studies of these phenomena have been limited primarily to animal models. Each year, millions of elderly adults, as well as millions of children, receive general anesthesia for surgery and other medical procedures. Anesthetic drugs act at specific receptors, such as GABA-A, to induce large stereotyped brain oscillations that act to functionally impair cortical, thalamocortical, and brainstem circuits. Recent studies have shown that anesthesia-induced oscillations undergo striking changes during aging and development. When combined with our understanding of anesthetic mechanisms, these studies provide new insights on how brain circuits change in humans during aging and development. In this talk, I will present data on this natural experiment of anesthesia, aging, and development, and will discuss potential scientific and clinical implications.
Speaker Bio
Patrick Purdon, PhD Dr. Purdon’s research integrates neuroimaging, biomedical signal processing, and the systems neuroscience of general anesthesia and sedation. His group conducts human studies of anesthesia-induced unconsciousness, using a variety of techniques including multimodal neuroimaging, high-density EEG, and invasive neurophysiological recordings used to diagnose medically refractory epilepsy. They also develop novel methods in neuroimaging and biomedical signal processing to support these studies, as well as methods for monitoring level of consciousness under general anesthesia using EEG.