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NIH Funds Collaborative Study of Cognitive Impairment in Older Asthma Patients

Led by SMU psychologist and UTSW psychiatrist, Dallas Asthma Brain and Cognition Study will use brain scans to explore relationship between inflammatory lung disease and brain function in older adults

DALLAS (SMU) – SMU psychologist Thomas Ritz and UT Southwestern Medical Center psychiatrist Sherwood Brown will lead a $2.6 million study funded over four years by the National Institutes of Health to explore the apparent connection between asthma and diminished cognitive function in middle-to-late-age adults.

The World Health Organization estimates that 235 million people suffer from asthma worldwide.

The study will build on the work Brown and Ritz have accomplished with a core group of researchers over a period of eight years. Their pilot data, gleaned from brain imaging and analysis of chemical changes, indicates that neurons in the hippocampus of young-to-middle-age adults with asthma are not as healthy as those in the control group without asthma. The hippocampus is that portion of the brain that controls long-term memory and spatial navigation.

“In our early study, we found that there were differences between healthy control participants and young-to-middle-age asthma patients in that the latter showed a slightly lower performance in cognitive tasks,” Ritz said. “We wonder how that looks in older age. When you have asthma for a lifetime, the burden of the disease may accumulate.”

The early findings also led his group to wonder if the impact on cognition is related to the severity of the disease.

“This all makes sense, but no one has looked specifically at how that relates to brain structure,” Ritz said.  “With this grant we will look at structures – the neurons and axons, the white and gray matter of the brain, how thick they are in various places. We look at what kind of chemicals have been accumulating, which are the byproducts of neural activity. We want to know how various areas of the brain function during cognitive tasks.”

The four-year project will allow researchers to study a sample of up to 200 participants who are between the ages of 40-69. In addition to Ritz and Brown, the research group includes Denise C. Park, director of research for the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas; Changho Choi, professor of radiology at UTSW; David Khan, professor of internal medicine at UTSW; Alicia E. Meuret, professor of clinical psychology at SMU, and David Rosenfield, associate professor of psychology at SMU.  SMU graduate students working on the grant are Juliet Kroll and Hannah Nordberg.

“This is how neuroimaging works today – it is a team sport,” Ritz said. “You cannot do it on your own. You have to strike up collaborations with various disciplines.  It’s very exciting because it is stimulating and interesting to collaborate with colleagues in different areas.”

The study, scheduled to run through May 31, 2022, will allow the research team to examine several possible factors that may impact cognition in people with asthma.

“Is it lack of oxygen?  That’s a very good question,” Ritz said. “But it cannot be the full story.  Real lack of oxygen only happens in severe asthma attacks and in most cases, people having an asthma attack are still well saturated with oxygen.

Carbon dioxide levels are often too low in asthma patients – but it is uncertain whether that is a .”

Another possibility, he said, is that the problems with disrupted sleep experienced by many people with asthma might relate to cognitive function.

“Just imagine you how you perform after lack of sleep,” Ritz said. “In the long run, we know sleep is important to the health of our brain. If over a lifetime you’ve had interruptions in sleep, it may impact your neural health.”

This research is being supported by the National Heart, Lung, And Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health under grant number 1R01HL142775-01.

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Psychology Today: Empathic People Use Social Brain Circuitry to Process Music

These areas of the brain uniquely activate in people with higher empathy when they listen to music. (Credit: SMU, UCLA)

High-empathy people process music using their social cognitive circuitry.

Christopher Bergland for Psychology Today covered the research of Zachary Wallmark, an assistant professor in the SMU Meadows School of the Arts. Wallmark’s study with researchers at UCLA found that people with higher empathy differ from others in the way their brains process music.

The SMU-UCLA study is the first to find evidence supporting a neural account of the music-empathy connection. Also, it is among the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore how empathy affects the way we perceive music.

The researchers found that compared to low empathy people, those with higher empathy process familiar music with greater involvement of the reward system of the brain, as well as in areas responsible for processing social information.

“This may indicate that music is being perceived weakly as a kind of social entity, as an imagined or virtual human presence,” Wallmark has said. He is director of the MuSci Lab at SMU, an interdisciplinary research collective that studies — among other things — how music affects the brain.

The Psychology Today article published June 18, 2018.

Read the full article.

EXCERPT:

By Christopher Bergland
Psychology Today
Those who deeply grasp the pain or joy of other people and display “higher empathic concern” process music differently in their brains, according to a new study by researchers at Southern Methodist University and UCLA. Their paper, “Neurophysiological Effects of Trait Empathy in Music Listening,” was recently published in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

As you can see by looking at the images at the top of the page and to the left, the SMU-UCLA researchers used fMRI neuroimaging to pinpoint specific brain areas that light up when people with varying degrees of trait empathy listen to music. Notably, the researchers found that higher empathy people process music as if it’s a pleasurable proxy for real-world human encounters and show greater involvement of brain regions associated with reward systems and social cognitive circuitry.

In the field of music psychology, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that varying degrees of trait empathy are linked to how intensely someone responds emotionally to music, his or her listening style, and overall musical preferences.

For example, recent studies have found that high-empathy people are more likely to enjoy “beautiful but sad” music. Additionally, high empathizers seem to get more intense pleasure from listening to music in general, as indicated by robust activation of their reward system in the fMRI.

The latest research on the empathy-music connection was conceived, designed, and led by Zachary Wallmark, who is a musicologist and assistant professor in the SMU Meadows School of the Arts. In 2014, Wallmark received his PhD from UCLA. He currently serves as director of the MuSci Lab, which is an interdisciplinary research collective and lab facility dedicated to the empirical study of music. Below is a YouTube clip of Wallmark describing his latest research:

Read the full article.

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KERA: Empathetic People Experience Music Differently, SMU Study Finds

These areas of the brain uniquely activate in people with higher empathy when they listen to music. (Credit: SMU, UCLA)

“This study contributes to a growing body of evidence that music processing may piggyback upon cognitive mechanisms that originally evolved to facilitate social interaction.” — Zachary Wallmark, SMU

KERA journalist Justin Martin covered the research of Zachary Wallmark, an assistant professor in the SMU Meadows School of the Arts. Wallmark’s study with researchers at UCLA found that people with higher empathy differ from others in the way their brains process music.

The SMU-UCLA study is the first to find evidence supporting a neural account of the music-empathy connection. Also, it is among the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore how empathy affects the way we perceive music.

The researchers found that compared to low empathy people, those with higher empathy process familiar music with greater involvement of the reward system of the brain, as well as in areas responsible for processing social information.

“This may indicate that music is being perceived weakly as a kind of social entity, as an imagined or virtual human presence,” Wallmark has said. He is director of the MuSci Lab at SMU, an interdisciplinary research collective that studies — among other things — how music affects the brain.

Listen to the KERA interview, which aired June 20, 2018.

EXCERPT:

By Justin Martin
KERA News
A new study from Southern Methodist University shows that empathetic people — those who are generally more sensitive to the feelings of others — receive more pleasure from listening to music, and their brains show increased activity in areas associated with social interactions.

Researchers interviewed participants about their taste in music — songs they loved and others they hated. Then, participants were put into an MRI scanner and played different selections, including unfamiliar tunes, and researchers studied how their brain reacted to them.

All participants experienced positive activity in the brain when listening to music they loved, says Zachary Wallmark, an assistant professor of musicology at SMU, who led the study. This activity increased for empathetic people.

When played unfamiliar music they didn’t like, empathetic participants still showed activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain, an area associated with executive control and regulation of emotional reactions, Wallmark says.

“What this suggested to us is that these empathic people are hearing new music…and they tell us they dislike it after the fact…but they might be deliberately trying to ratchet down their negative reaction, maybe give more of the benefit of the doubt to this new music, even though they find it highly aversive,” Wallmark said.

Listen to the KERA interview.

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Mild problem-solving task improves brain function after a concussion, new study suggests

A simple cognitive task as early as four days after a brain injury activates the region that improves memory function, and may guard against developing depression or anxiety

Concern is growing about the danger of sports-related concussions and their long-term impact on athletes. But physicians and healthcare providers acknowledge that the science is evolving, leaving questions about rehabilitation and treatment options.

Currently, guidelines recommend that traumatic brain injury patients get plenty of rest and avoid physical and cognitive activity until symptoms subside.

But a new pilot study looking at athletes with concussions suggests total inactivity may not be the best way to recover after all, say scientists at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, where the research was conducted.

The study found that a simple cognitive task as early as four days after a brain injury activated the region that improves memory function and can guard against two hallmarks of concussion — depression and anxiety.

“Right now, if you have a concussion the directive is to have complete physical and cognitive rest, no activities, no social interaction, to let your brain rest and recover from the energy crisis as a result of the injury,” said SMU physiologist Sushmita Purkayastha, who led the research, which was funded by the Texas Institute for Brain Injury and Repair at UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas.

“But what we saw, the student athletes came in on approximately the third day of their concussion and the test was not stressful for them. None of the patients complained about any symptom aggravation as a result of the task. Their parasympathetic nervous system — which regulates automatic responses such as heart rate when the body is at rest — was activated, which is a good sign,” said Purkayastha, an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Physiology and Wellness.

The parasympathetic nervous system is associated with better memory function and implicated in better cardiovascular function. It also helps to regulates stress, depression and anxiety — and those are very common symptoms after a concussion.

“People in the absolute rest phase after concussion often experience depression,” Purkayastha added. “In the case of concussion, cutting people off from their social circle when we say ‘no screen time’ — particularly the young generation with their cell phones and iPads — they will just get more depressed and anxious. So maybe we need to rethink current rehabilitation strategy.”

The new study addresses the lack of research upon which to develop science- and data-based treatment for concussion. The findings emerged when the research team measured variations in heart rate variability among athletes with concussions while responding to simple problem-solving and decision-making tasks.

While we normally think of our heart rate as a steady phenomenon, in actuality the interval varies and is somewhat irregular — and that is desirable and healthy. High heart rate variability is an indicator of sound cardiovascular health. Higher levels of variability indicate that physiological processes are better controlled and functioning as they should, such as during stressful (both physical and challenging mental tasks) or emotional situations.

Concussed athletes normally have lowered heart rate variability.

For the new study, Purkayastha and her team administered a fairly simple cognitive task to athletes with concussions. During the task, the athletes recorded a significant increase in heart rate variability.

The study is the first of its kind to examine heart rate variability in college athletes with concussions during a cognitive task.

The findings suggest that a small measure of brain work could be beneficial, said co-investigator and neuro-rehabilitation specialist Kathleen R. Bell, a physician at UT Southwestern.

“This type of research will change fundamentally the way that patients with sports and other concussions are treated,” said Bell, who works with brain injury patients and is Chair of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at UT Southwestern. “Understanding the basic physiology of brain injury and repair is the key to enhancing recovery for our young people after concussion.”

The researchers reported their findings in the peer-reviewed Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, in the article “Reduced resting and increased elevation of heart rate variability with cognitive task performance in concussed athletes.”

Co-authors from SMU Simmons School include Mu Huang and Justin Frantz; Peter F. Davis and Scott L. Davis, from SMU’s Department of Applied Physiology and Wellness; Gilbert Moralez, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, Dallas; and Tonia Sabo, UT Southwestern.

Concussion symptom improved with simple brain activity
Volunteer subjects for the study were 46 NCAA Division I and recreational athletes who participate in contact-collision sports. Of those, 23 had a physician-diagnosed sports-related concussion in accordance with NCAA diagnostic criteria. Each of them underwent the research testing within approximately three to four days after their injury.

Not surprisingly, compared to the athletes in the control group who didn’t have concussions, the athletes with concussions entered answers that were largely incorrect.

More importantly, though, the researchers observed a positive physiological response to the task in the form of increased heart rate variability, said Purkayastha.

“It’s true that the concussed group gave wrong answers for the most part. More important, however, is the fact that during the task their heart rate variability improved,” she said. “That was most likely due to the enhancement of their brain activity, which led to better regulation. It seems that engaging in a cognitive task is crucial for recovery.”

Heart rate variability is a normal physiological process of the heart. It makes possible a testing method as noninvasive as taking a patient’s blood pressure, pulse or temperature. In the clinical field, measuring heart rate variability is an increasingly common screening tool to see if involuntary responses in the body are functioning and being regulated properly by the autonomic nervous system.

The parasympathetic is blunted or dampened by concussion
Abnormal fluctuations in heart rate variability are associated with certain conditions before symptoms are otherwise noticeable.

Monitoring heart rate variability measures the normal synchronized contractions of the heart’s atriums and ventricles in response to natural electrical impulses that rhythmically move across the muscles of the heart.

After a concussion, an abnormal and unhealthy decline in heart rate variability is observed in the parasympathetic nervous system, a branch of the autonomic nervous system. The parasympathetic is in effect blunted or dampened after a concussion, said Purkayastha.

As expected, in the current study, heart rate variability was lower among the athletes with concussions than those without.

New findings add evidence suggesting experts rethink rehab
But that changed during the simple cognitive task. For the athletes with concussions, their heart rate variability increased, indicating the parasympathetic nervous system was activated by the task.

Heart rate variability between the concussed and the controls was comparable during the cognitive task, the researchers said in their study.

“This suggests that maybe we need to rethink rehabilitation after someone has a concussion,” Purkayastha said. — Margaret Allen, SMU

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People who deeply grasp the pain or happiness of others also process music differently in the brain

These areas of the brain uniquely activate in people with higher empathy when they listen to music. (Credit: SMU, UCLA)

Higher empathy people appear to process music like a pleasurable proxy for a human encounter — in the brain regions for reward, social awareness and regulation of social emotions.

People with higher empathy differ from others in the way their brains process music, according to a study by researchers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas and UCLA.

The researchers found that compared to low empathy people, those with higher empathy process familiar music with greater involvement of the reward system of the brain, as well as in areas responsible for processing social information.

“High-empathy and low-empathy people share a lot in common when listening to music, including roughly equivalent involvement in the regions of the brain related to auditory, emotion, and sensory-motor processing,” said lead author Zachary Wallmark, an assistant professor in the SMU Meadows School of the Arts.

But there is at least one significant difference.

Highly empathic people process familiar music with greater involvement of the brain’s social circuitry, such as the areas activated when feeling empathy for others. They also seem to experience a greater degree of pleasure in listening, as indicated by increased activation of the reward system.

“This may indicate that music is being perceived weakly as a kind of social entity, as an imagined or virtual human presence,” Wallmark said.

Researchers in 2014 reported that about 20 percent of the population is highly empathic. These are people who are especially sensitive and respond strongly to social and emotional stimuli.

The SMU-UCLA study is the first to find evidence supporting a neural account of the music-empathy connection. Also, it is among the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore how empathy affects the way we perceive music.

The new study indicates that among higher-empathy people, at least, music is not solely a form of artistic expression.

“If music was not related to how we process the social world, then we likely would have seen no significant difference in the brain activation between high-empathy and low-empathy people,” said Wallmark, who is director of the MuSci Lab at SMU, an interdisciplinary research collective that studies — among other things — how music affects the brain.

“This tells us that over and above appreciating music as high art, music is about humans interacting with other humans and trying to understand and communicate with each other,” he said.

This may seem obvious.

“But in our culture we have a whole elaborate system of music education and music thinking that treats music as a sort of disembodied object of aesthetic contemplation,” Wallmark said. “In contrast, the results of our study help explain how music connects us to others. This could have implications for how we understand the function of music in our world, and possibly in our evolutionary past.”

The researchers reported their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, in the article “Neurophysiological effects of trait empathy in music listening.”

The co-authors are Choi Deblieck, with the University of Leuven, Belgium, and Marco Iacoboni, UCLA. The research was carried out at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at UCLA.

“The study shows on one hand the power of empathy in modulating music perception, a phenomenon that reminds us of the original roots of the concept of empathy — ‘feeling into’ a piece of art,” said senior author Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

“On the other hand,” Iacoboni said, “the study shows the power of music in triggering the same complex social processes at work in the brain that are at play during human social interactions.”

Comparison of brain scans showed distinctive differences based on empathy
Participants were 20 UCLA undergraduate students. They were each scanned in an MRI machine while listening to excerpts of music that were either familiar or unfamiliar to them, and that they either liked or disliked. The familiar music was selected by participants prior to the scan.

Afterward each person completed a standard questionnaire to assess individual differences in empathy — for example, frequently feeling sympathy for others in distress, or imagining oneself in another’s shoes.

The researchers then did controlled comparisons to see which areas of the brain during music listening are correlated with empathy.

Analysis of the brain scans showed that high empathizers experienced more activity in the dorsal striatum, part of the brain’s reward system, when listening to familiar music, whether they liked the music or not.

The reward system is related to pleasure and other positive emotions. Malfunction of the area can lead to addictive behaviors.

Empathic people process music with involvement of social cognitive circuitry
In addition, the brain scans of higher empathy people in the study also recorded greater activation in medial and lateral areas of the prefrontal cortex that are responsible for processing the social world, and in the temporoparietal junction, which is critical to analyzing and understanding others’ behaviors and intentions.

Typically, those areas of the brain are activated when people are interacting with, or thinking about, other people. Observing their correlation with empathy during music listening might indicate that music to these listeners functions as a proxy for a human encounter.

Beyond analysis of the brain scans, the researchers also looked at purely behavioral data — answers to a survey asking the listeners to rate the music afterward.

Those data also indicated that higher empathy people were more passionate in their musical likes and dislikes, such as showing a stronger preference for unfamiliar music.

Precise neurophysiological relationship between empathy and music is largely unexplored
A large body of research has focused on the cognitive neuroscience of empathy — how we understand and experience the thoughts and emotions of other people. Studies point to a number of areas of the prefrontal, insular, and cingulate cortices as being relevant to what brain scientists refer to as social cognition.

Studies have shown that activation of the social circuitry in the brain varies from individual to individual. People with more empathic personalities show increased activity in those areas when performing socially relevant tasks, including watching a needle penetrating skin, listening to non-verbal vocal sounds, observing emotional facial expressions, or seeing a loved one in pain.

In the field of music psychology, a number of recent studies have suggested that empathy is related to intensity of emotional responses to music, listening style, and musical preferences — for example, empathic people are more likely to enjoy sad music.

“This study contributes to a growing body of evidence,” Wallmark said, “that music processing may piggyback upon cognitive mechanisms that originally evolved to facilitate social interaction.” — Margaret Allen, SMU