UAB Magazine Weekly - Features on Research
Alabama’s Lost Tribe
UAB Team Tracks a Forgotten People
By Claire L. Burgess
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After years of isolation and poverty, Alabama’s MOWA Choctaw tribe is reclaiming its roots—with the help of UAB alumna Jacqueline Matte and UAB anthropologist Loretta Cormier. |
Thirty years ago, UAB alumna Jacqueline Matte went out to the Choctaw reservation in southwest Alabama in search of a story. What she found has haunted her ever since, fueling decades of interviews, investigations, and heartache. Nine years ago, UAB anthropologist Loretta Cormier, Ph.D., joined the struggle. Separately and together, Matte and Cormier have fought through swamps both literal and legal, seeking clues to one of the great vanishing acts in Alabama history. It is no easy task; after all, they are looking for a people who haven’t wanted to be found for more than 150 years.
The Alabama Choctaw lived in poverty and isolation until the 1940s, when they began sending some of their children to Indian schools in other states because their own were not accredited. When those educated children came home, they led the tribe out of isolation and into the public eye, launching a campaign for state recognition. In 1979, they officially became the MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians, the first recognized tribe in Alabama. (The name MOWA comes from the tribe's location on the Mobile County-Washington County line.) The following year, the tribe began to seek federal recognition, a lengthy and involved process requiring extensive genealogical research. That is where Jacqueline Matte comes in.
In Sight?
UAB Researchers Focus On New Clues to Macular Degeneration
By Bob Shepard
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Christine Curcio has studied age-related eye diseases throughout her 28-year career as an eye researcher. |
Oversized phone dials. Magnifiers. Little tricks with peripheral vision. There are many ways to cope with age-related macular degeneration (ARMD). Unfortunately, one of the most popular is denial.
“Half of my new patients at the UAB Center for Low Vision Rehabilitation want me to make them a new pair of glasses so they can go home and have everything the way it was before,” says UAB optometrist Dawn DeCarlo, O.D., the center’s director. “Many patients have no idea what ARMD really means.”
For a long time, even researchers didn’t know a great deal about this devastating condition. And even though they’ve made progress in recent years, they still face some maddening blind spots. The disease, as its name implies, is associated with aging, and it gradually destroys sharp, central vision. ARMD comes in two forms: wet and dry. The wet form, which affects about 15 percent of those with ARMD, leads to more severe vision loss, but its cause is reasonably well understood. In a process called neovascularization, abnormal blood vessels behind the retina grow into the macula, the center of the retina. These blood vessels can rupture and leak, damaging the macula by separating it from the rest of the retina. The good news is that there are new medications, called anti-VEGF drugs, that are extremely effective in treating the wet form of the disease.
Survival Diet
UAB Uses Nutrition Science to Fight AIDS in Africa
By Tara Hulen
As medical mysteries go, this one is particularly heartbreaking. Several years ago, UAB clinicians began a large-scale program to bring lifesaving antiretroviral therapy to Zambia. But to their surprise, the same wonder drugs that revolutionized AIDS treatment in the United States produced untoward side effects in Africa.
Scientists at UAB’s Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia (CIDRZ), which administers the program, were perplexed. “In the first 90 days, an unexpectedly large number of patients die after the drugs are started,” says Douglas Heimburger, M.D., a researcher and professor in nutrition sciences and medicine at UAB. “But if they can get through the first 90 days, the patients’ mortality rates are very similar to patients on similar therapies in the United States.”
The Plastic Brain: Part 2
UAB Neuroscientists Stretch the Boundaries of the Mind
By Bob Shepard
Image courtesy of J. Palop
The brain, as we saw in last week's story, is "plastic" in the sense that it can reshape itself after injury. But the power of plasticity doesn't stop there, says David Sweatt, Ph.D., chair of the UAB Department of Neurobiology, director of the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute, and Evelyn F. McKnight Endowed Chair for Learning and Memory in Aging. According to Sweatt, the brain is also able to strengthen the connections between neurons—and even make new neurons.
Neurons, Sweatt explains, are the fundamental information-processing units of the brain. But they do not work in isolation; instead, each neuron communicates with thousands of its neighbors through specialized connections called synapses. “It turns out that perhaps half of the synapses in the adult nervous system have a robust capacity to change the strength of the connections between neurons,” Sweatt says. “That is an important part of how the brain works, how we store information, and how we adapt to environmental stimuli.”
It is also an important part of memory, says Sweatt—in fact, he argues, synapses are the keys to memory. And once scientists understand how the adult brain strengthens certain synapses, they can begin to manipulate the process—finding ways to slow down or delay the inevitable memory loss associated with aging.
The Plastic Brain
UAB Neuroscientists Stretch the Boundaries of the Mind
The big news in neuroscience these days is that you can change your mind. Not just in superficial ways, either, such as opting for milk over creamer or paper instead of plastic, although plasticity has a lot to do with it. The field is abuzz with mind-bending research indicating that the adult brain can be shaped—repaired, expanded, optimized—in ways that were unimaginable only a few decades ago.
You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, the saying goes. And for decades, scientists thought the same thing about the human brain. An adult brain, the textbooks said, is not plastic—that is, it has no ability to change, to grow, to repair itself if injured. At birth, in infancy, and through childhood, the central nervous system is malleable; it can grow and change depending on different stimuli. But researchers were certain that this ability fades upon maturity, leaving the adult brain with the capacity to diminish—through injury, disease, or simply old age—but not to grow new cells or structures, or to repair the damage it accumulates over a lifetime. Distinguished Spanish neuroscientist Ramón y Cajal summarized the viewpoint succinctly in 1913: “Everything may die; nothing may be regenerated.”
