Parietal cortical structure and function in attentional disorders

英国每年约有15万人患中风，当人们患中风时，他们通常会留下一种非常特殊的损伤。他们可以正常地看到和移动，但他们表现得好像忽略了周围的部分环境。通常，在右脑中风后，这些患者会忽略左脑周围的环境。传统上，研究人员专注于试图确定受损大脑区域的功能，以期找到恢复这些患者正常功能的线索。然而，越来越清楚的是，从大脑区域网络的相互作用角度来理解大脑和大脑功能障碍，而不是简单地关注单个大脑区域，这一点很重要。因此，中风患者所经历的问题可能不能纯粹用大脑某一区域的损伤来解释，而是一个区域的损伤对大脑其他区域活动的影响。如果这是真的，那么开发一种治疗方法就不应该只关注受损区域，而应该关注损伤对其他大脑区域的影响。在这个项目中，我们试图探讨这种可能性。在健康志愿者中，我们将绘制中风中经常受损的大脑结构，并调查它们对中风患者所经历的问题的影响。这将通过结合神经科学研究技术来完成，使我们能够无创地探测活体大脑。此外，我们将研究通过治疗脑活动分布模式的变化来减轻中风患者所经历的问题的可能性。

When people suffer from stroke, which happens to about 150000 people each year in the UK, they often are left with a very specific type of impairment. They can see and move normally, but they act as if they ignore parts of their surroundings. Usually, following a stroke on the right side of the brain these patients ignore the left part of their surroundings. Researchers have traditionally focused on trying to determine the function of the damaged brain area in the hope of finding clues to restoring normal functioning in these patients. However, it is increasingly clear that it is important to understand the brain and disorders of brain function in terms of the interactions of networks of brain areas rather than simply focusing on a single brain area. Thus, the problems experienced by patients who have suffered a stroke might not be explained purely by the damage to a single brain region, but by the effects that damage to one area has on activity elsewhere in the brain. If this is true, to develop a treatment one should not just focus on the damaged area, but on the consequences of the damage to other brain regions. In this project, we try to investigate this possibility. In healthy volunteers, we will map the brain structures that are often damaged in stroke and investigate their contribution to the problems stroke patients experience. This will be done using a combination of neuroscientific research techniques that allow us to probe the living brain non-invasively. Also, we will investigate the possibility of alleviating the problems experienced by stroke patients by treating changes in distributed patterns of brain activity.