Neurosciences: Saving Brain Power 

Just as the Hubble Space Telescope expanded our view of the universe, the neurosciences have opened new vistas on the human brain.

Today’s neuroscientists can see deeper into our thoughts, feelings and motor functions than ever before. They’re getting better at brain surgery, spinal repair and behavioral interventions. The truth is, though, they’ve got to do even better, because neurological disease is going to be one of the massive healthcare challenges of the next 20 years.

When it comes to the neurosciences, we’re seeing the most rapid advances taking place at collaborative centers like Cleveland Clinic’s Neurological Institute. Here, neurologists, neurosurgeons, psychiatrists and psychologists work with geneticists, neuro-radiologists and other specialists to tackle the big issues of brain health. They’re burrowing down to identify the physiological basis of devastating diseases like major depression and obsessive compulsive disorder. They’re refining deep brain stimulation for movement disorders, behavioral health, and neuropathic pain.

The entire discipline is establishing rational foundations for the study of phenomena once shrouded in fear and darkness. With epilepsy, for instance, caregivers in the Neurological Institute are generating 4D maps of the brain that combine fMRI with intracranial stimulation to pinpoint epileptic seizure sites for surgical intervention. Another team is testing a cell-phone sized stimulator to zap migraine headaches.

Multidisciplinary teams at the Neurological Institute are collaborating on ways to treat concussion, stroke, and paralysis. They’re taking a new approach to awkwardly sited tumors on the brain steam – removing them minimally invasively through the nose. They’re using lasers to excise other brain tumors, and transcranial magnetic stimulation to treat intractable depression.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest news stories out of the Neurological Institute last year was also one of the most alarming. A study that reviewed all of the Alzheimer’s disease drugs entering the clinical trial pipeline from all sources between 2002 and 2012 showed that 99.6 percent of these drugs failed. In other words, there is still virtually no good medical treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.

But researchers at Cleveland Clinic’s Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas, Nevada, derived some important conclusions from the study. For one, they suspect that drugs are being deployed too late in the course of the disease to be effective. We need ways to detect Alzheimer’s disease earlier, and search for treatments that can begin sooner. More funding for research into diseases of the aging brain is critical. The developed world is getting older and without new treatments for conditions like Alzheimer’s, we’re looking at large-scale human and economic catastrophe.

The answer to this, as with every other healthcare challenge, is innovation. I have complete confidence that with additional support from the government and philanthropy, neuroscientists at the Cleveland Clinic and elsewhere will ultimately find the key to these devastating diseases of aging – and that it won’t be a moment too soon.