Researcher Spotlight: Coleen Atkins
Categories: Research
Coleen Atkins, Ph.D., University of Miami Miller School of Medicine was awarded a seed grant of $25,000 for her project “The Effects of Early Life Stress on Outcome after Mild Traumatic Brain Injury.”
Project Information
Project Title: “The Effects of Early Life Stress on Outcome after Mild Traumatic Brain Injury”
Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is a significant health problem in the US. Although most people with mTBI recover within a few weeks, a subset has persistent symptoms. The factors that contribute to persistent symptoms after mTBI are unknown. One potential factor identified in a study of mTBI patients is pre-exposure to stress in early development. Early life stress is highly prevalent and causes immune dysregulation in adulthood. This proposal will determine if early life stress limits recovery after a mTBI and test if an anti-inflammatory drug improves recovery after mTBI and stress.
What compelled you to make the career choice you have as a research scientist?
I began my career in basic research, studying how we learn and make memories. This research was very rewarding, and I love understanding the biochemical changes that occur in neurons when we learn. However, this research was very distant from making an impact on people with learning and memory, problems. Therefore, I transitioned to the field of traumatic brain injury (TBI) with the hope to develop therapies to improve learning and memory after TBI. Nearly 80% of people with TBI have problems with learning and memory. My goal is to develop a therapeutic to improve learning and memory in chronic TBI survivors.
How has support from the Brain Injury Association of America helped you achieve your research goals?
This grant support from the BIAA will help me complete a research study of understanding whether chronic stress is a predisposing factor for learning and memory problems after concussion. We are using this support to determine if neuronal death or synaptic damage are exacerbated after concussion if there is a history of chronic stress.
What message do you have for donors supporting the Brain Injury Research Fund?
Traumatic brain injury research is underfunded, especially given the magnitude of the public health consequences. There are an estimated 2.8 million TBIs occurring annually in the USA. But NIH funding does not match this public health impact. There are some limited funding opportunities from the Department of Defense, but no foundations other than the BIAA offer research support for TBI studies. This situation is unlike research support for Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, stroke, and spinal cord injury, where there are excellent funding opportunities from private foundations. The support from BIAA is highly invaluable and needed for the TBI research community.
Why is it important to support brain injury research?
TBI survivors are often not vocal and visible in our society. This is often hidden suffering that does not reach our public consciousness. There is a lot of opportunity to improve recovery after TBI, even months after the initial injury. Increasing support for brain injury research will allow researchers to develop new, innovative treatments and push these therapies forward faster to TBI survivors.
What else would be helpful for our community of donors and supporters to know about your work?
Our laboratory is also studying the interaction between Alzheimer’s disease and concussion. We are evaluating whether a concussion that occurs before Alzheimer’s disease pathology is evident in the brain results in a faster onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
After you complete the research that this grant supports, what new platform of information do you hope to have for you to base your next research grant upon? What is your expectation that next research project will seek to reveal or determine?
We hope to determine if pathology in the brain is worsened after concussion due to chronic stress. Our next study will be to identify the mechanism so that we can then begin to develop a potential therapy. One possibility is that inflammation mediated by immune cells in the brain is aggravated by chronic stress. This may change the microglia’s response to concussion, increasing inflammation. We are beginning to test a drug that targets microglia and their inflammatory response to determine if this will improve recovery after concussion.
What opportunities exist to impact practice or policy with your research?
We hope that our research will impact clinical practices by developing a drug therapy that may be given to people with concussion who have chronic learning and memory problems.
About Coleen
I have a broad background in neuroscience with expertise in hippocampal synaptic plasticity, learning and memory, and traumatic brain injury (TBI). I have published 25 papers in the field of TBI describing how many of the molecular pathways that underlie learning and memory are dysregulated after TBI. In recognition of my contributions, I was the 2013 recipient of the Brain Injury Association of America Young Investigator Award and am currently a PI on an NIH R01 grant to develop cognitive enhancers for TBI. I also have a wide-ranging perspective on the field of TBI by serving on study sections for NIH, DOD, and the New Jersey Commission on Brain Injury Research. I am serving as Vice-President of the National Neurotrauma Society, which focuses on TBI and spinal cord injury research. Recently, my laboratory has begun to study how mild TBI recovery is altered by different variables at the time of injury. We found that elevated temperature, which occurs frequently in athletes and military personnel in warm ambient environments, exacerbates pathology and worsens cognition after mTBI. These published studies led us to investigate the overall question of this proposal, why a subset of people do not fully recover after mTBI and to determine if early life stress encountered in childhood is a key variable for chronic symptoms during the recovery from mild TBI.
Education
Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Neuroscience, University of Miami, July 2007; Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Neuroscience, Oregon Health & Science University, May 2004; Doctor of Philosophy in Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, May 1999; Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, University of Minnesota, January 1993.
Click here to learn more about the Research Grants Program.