Like a lot of people, after a particularly long day at work, David Niddam likes to have a beer and relax. Unlike most people, he can explain how the alcohol in that beer moves from his bloodstream to his spinal cord, cerebellum and cerebral cortex, where it increases dopamine and norepinephrine levels, decreases the transmission within his acetylcholine systems, bumps up the production of beta-endorphin in his hypothalamus and puts a smile on his face.
Niddam works in the Integrated Brain Research Unit (IBRU) of Taipei Veterans General Hospital, a facility under the administration of both the hospital and National Yangming University. Earlier this week he gave the Taipei Times a tour of the facilities, where current research topics include epilepsy, cognitive linguistics, mood disorders and the genetic mapping of spino-cerebellar ataxia, a type of neuro-muscular degeneration specific to Taiwanese.
For his part, Niddam researches pain. He has been with the IBRU since 2002, coming to Taiwan after completing his doctoral studies at Aalborg University in his native Denmark. He chose to work at the IBRU, he said, because the facility is among the best in the world in terms of the quantity and quality of hardware available to researchers, making his research a little less painful.
PHOTO: DAVID MOMPHARD, TAIPEI TIMES
"In brain research the gold standard is to know which local brain networks are involved in a specific task and how they are connected through global networks," he said.
Equally important are knowing the order in which those networks are activated, being able to follow the information that flows through them, and understanding the biochemistry involved in the process.
"Ideally, we would like to have all that information from the same subjects or patients," Niddam said, instead of piecing together bits of information from hospitals and research centers across the globe.
PHOTO COURTESY OF DAVID NIDDAM
To make that possible, National Yangming University and Taipei Veterans Hospital have established the Research Center for Neuroimaging and Neuroinformatics to bring into one facility all the instruments required in neurological research.
"This is a new trend worldwide and it's called multimodal brain imaging," Niddam said, adding that the researchers at National Yangming University and the Veterans Hospital were the only ones in the past year to receive money from the National Health and Research Institute of Taiwan to establish a center.
"So it means this area has been acknowledged as a key research area for Taiwan," he said.
Among the hardware available to Niddam and his fellow researchers are six magnetic imaging resonance (MRI) machines as well as electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) machines.
EEGs and MEGs record from outside the brain. The EEG does so when the patient puts on a rather unfashionable Lycra cap with dozens of electrodes attached to it. The MEG has the patient sit in a room that has been shielded from the earth's magnetic forces and place their head in an inverted bowl.
The benefit of both the EEG and MEG is an ability to follow brain activity in real time, down to the millisecond. However, the machines cannot pinpoint where in the brain the activity is taking place to an area smaller than 100,000 or more brain cells.
With the MRI technology that looks deep into the brain, activity can be located to areas smaller than a millimeter, but cannot provide the temporal accuracy of an EEG or MEG. MRI works by tilting the spin of every atom in the body in the same direction, then sending pulses of radio waves into the scanner which knock the nucleus of each cell out of its proper alignment. When it realigns, it sends a signal which the scanner records, analyzes and drafts into an image.
Another form of MRI measurement, called a functional MRI, can measure brain activity by detecting oxygen levels in specific brain areas.
Niddam's colleague, Yeh Tzu-chen (葉子城), showed the MRI scan of a patient with a brain tumor. The functional MRI, he explained, is used not only to pinpoint the location of the tumor, but to discern what functions the areas of the brain beside the tumor control.
Because of the tumor's location on the left side of the patient's brain, there was a risk that surgery could leave the patient without the use of the right hand.
"During the MRI, I stood next to the patient and tapped on their foot," said Yeh, who is also an assistant professor in the Department of Radiology at National Yangming University Medical School. "They knew that when I did they should move their right hand. The MRI recorded exactly which part of the brain next to the tumor was responsible for moving the hand, creating an indispensable map for surgeons to use in removing the tumor."
"Remember those guys who invented [MRI] got the Nobel for it?" Niddam said, referring to American Paul C. Lauterbur and Briton Sir Peter Mansfield's 2003 prize. "Without it, diagnosis worldwide would be much less efficient."
Behind a car repair business on a nondescript Thai street are the cherished pets of a rising TikTok animal influencer: two lions and a 200-kilogram lion-tiger hybrid called “Big George.” Lion ownership is legal in Thailand, and Tharnuwarht Plengkemratch is an enthusiastic advocate, posting updates on his feline companions to nearly three million followers. “They’re playful and affectionate, just like dogs or cats,” he said from inside their cage complex at his home in the northern city of Chiang Mai. Thailand’s captive lion population has exploded in recent years, with nearly 500 registered in zoos, breeding farms, petting cafes and homes. Experts warn the
The unexpected collapse of the recall campaigns is being viewed through many lenses, most of them skewed and self-absorbed. The international media unsurprisingly focuses on what they perceive as the message that Taiwanese voters were sending in the failure of the mass recall, especially to China, the US and to friendly Western nations. This made some sense prior to early last month. One of the main arguments used by recall campaigners for recalling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers was that they were too pro-China, and by extension not to be trusted with defending the nation. Also by extension, that argument could be
Aug. 4 to Aug. 10 When Coca-Cola finally pushed its way into Taiwan’s market in 1968, it allegedly vowed to wipe out its major domestic rival Hey Song within five years. But Hey Song, which began as a manual operation in a family cow shed in 1925, had proven its resilience, surviving numerous setbacks — including the loss of autonomy and nearly all its assets due to the Japanese colonial government’s wartime economic policy. By the 1960s, Hey Song had risen to the top of Taiwan’s beverage industry. This success was driven not only by president Chang Wen-chi’s
Last week, on the heels of the recall election that turned out so badly for Taiwan, came the news that US President Donald Trump had blocked the transit of President William Lai (賴清德) through the US on his way to Latin America. A few days later the international media reported that in June a scheduled visit by Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) for high level meetings was canceled by the US after China’s President Xi Jinping (習近平) asked Trump to curb US engagement with Taiwan during a June phone call. The cancellation of Lai’s transit was a gaudy
RSS