So we would like some guidance. The other project may help the 2 million Americans who suffer brain damage each year from automobile accidents, gunshot wounds, beatings and other types of trauma. About 100,000 die, and 80,000 are left with long-term disabilities. Diringer and Robert L. Grubb Jr., M.D., the Herbert Lourie Professor of Neurological Surgery and a professor of radiology, will use PET imaging to look for ischemia in 60 head-injured patients. This procedure is widely used to control the most threatening aspect of head injury, rising pressure inside the skull - the rigid skull can't expand, so high pressure can injure delicate brain tissue.
Hyperventilation works by constricting blood vessels, however.
Tom O. Videen, Ph.D., a research assistant professor of neurology and radiology, also will play a leading role. Joel S. Perlmutter, M.D., an associate professor of neurology and radiology, and Edward L. Spitznagel Jr., Ph.D., a professor of mathematics in Arts and Sciences and of biostatistics at the School of Medicine, also are involved in the research. To obtain the federal grant, the researchers had to demonstrate the feasibility of their proposal. Funds for the necessary preliminary studies came from the Lillian Strauss Fund, which was established by Malcolm Strauss and his two daughters in 1974. Mrs. Strauss died of a stroke in 1973 at age 47.