Research Tracks                                  Leadership & Learning

Cognitive neuroscience is poised to make significant contributions to public health. Clinical and research neuroscience, long the domain of refined clinical and research procedures and highly trained practitioners, providing time-intensive services to one patient at a time, is now becoming the domain of a group of scientists who are using technology to bring selected elements of neuroscience to large populations, efficiently and at minimal expense.

As the cost of a clinical or research service declines, it correspondingly becomes available to larger and larger populations, at some point becoming so convenient and inexpensive it can be used as a public health instrument useful for public health objectives such as population surveillance for emergence and early detection of central nervous system disease and the effects of environmental toxins and nutrients on the cognitive and motor functions of large populations in naturalistic settings.

The NRH Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (CCN) seeks to make assessment of brain function a part of routine primary care medicine. Just as the creation of simple and inexpensive ways for monitoring blood pressure has permitted addressing high blood pressure as a public health issue, the creation of simple, inexpensive ways to monitor brain health could permit early diagnosis and correspondingly earlier treatment.

Under the current health care system, brain diseases typically are not brought to medical attention until symptoms are noticeable and adversely affecting the person's daily living. Progression of many neurologic diseases to this point means that significant and irreparable damage already has occurred. An illustration of the pivotal nature of early diagnosis of neurologic disease: if a medication were to become available that would stop Parkinson's disease from progressing further, the main determinant of the treatment's benefit would be how early in the disease process the diagnosis was made and the treatment instituted. The CCN's vision is to move the clock forward for diagnosis and treatment.