Donald M. Caspary This is Me

Education

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1. 1. American Tinnitus Association - Current ATA - Funded Research Projects

   www.ata.org/research/research_ - [Cached]

   Published on: 11/23/2007   Last Visited: 1/29/2008

   Donald M. Caspary, Ph.D. Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, Springfield, Illinois
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   Caspary's team is investigating the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN), a tiny structure in the brain, where they have found changes in the brain chemical glycine. In the final year of this study, they are completing the measurement of glycine changes in DCN cells of both young and aged animals with tinnitus. Findings from these studies should help them understand the impact of aging on brain chemistry, in particular, on tinnitus-related brain chemistry. This ultimately could help define unique targets for the development of drugs for treating tinnitus. NOTE: In July 2007, Caspary and his team received a five-year, $1.25 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue this study.

2. 2. Sangamon County Medical Society Committees Page

   www.scmsdocs.org/public/compon - [Cached]

   Published on: 6/16/2006   Last Visited: 6/2/2007

   4. Donald M. Caspary, Ph.D.
   
   Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, Department of Pharmacology
   
   Professor of pharmacology and SIUC University distinguished scholar

3. 3. news-banner.com

   news-banner.com/index/news-app - [Cached]

   Published on: 2/8/2007   Last Visited: 3/18/2007

   As Donald Caspary has gotten older, he finds when he drives that he needs to adjust the volume of his car radio more often to offset the sound of the wind and the engine. Caspary, 61, may not be losing his hearing, but his brain may have become less nimble in screening out background noise. It's a common situation that requires him and many other drivers to reach for the volume knob on the radio for a better listening experience. "Your brain used to do that for you very efficiently," he said. An internationally known neuroscientist at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, Caspary has worked with colleagues at SIU the past 25 years to discover the chemistry that takes place in the brain as hearing ability declines with age. The changes that cause inconveniences for drivers such as Caspary also contribute to the devastating loss of hearing that affects 30 percent of Americans 65 to 74 and at least half of Americans 75 and older. SIU is one of a handful of academic centers in the United States with a team of scientists examining hearing loss in ways that could lead to drug treatments for people as they age, and give them options beyond hearing aids. "People don't drop dead from hearing loss," said Caspary, who holds the titles of "distinguished scholar" and professor of pharmacology at SIU. But he said hearing loss, which often causes people to withdraw socially, is a huge problem. "It may be the second major malady after arthritic diseases in terms of raw numbers," he said. "The only other one that comes close is hypertension." Caspary, a native of New York City, joined the medical school faculty in 1973 and has received more than $4.2 million in grant funding since then, mostly from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. He is part of SIU's "auditory research group" - scientists who have received total grants of $14.5 million since 1978. Caspary is among scientists in the group who focus on age-related hearing loss and have received $7.3 million in grants since 1978. The scientists working with Caspary in their studies of aging include professors Tom Brozoski and Larry Hughes, associate professors Robert Helfert and Dr. Carol Bauer, assistant professor Jeremy Turner and senior researcher Lynne Ling.
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   Caspary and his fellow scientists analyze the brain tissue of laboratory rats, as well as rat brain cells while those cells are reacting to stimuli through probes connected to the brain; the animals are anesthetized and unconscious.
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   Whatever the cause, Caspary's research has shown that parts of the brain often respond to the decreased input with chemical changes that reduce the normal filtering and processing effect. The brain may be attempting to increase the volume to compensate for the loss of input. A younger person's brain can focus on a softer sound automatically, but an older person trying to compensate for less sound reaching the brain is less nimble at adjusting that biological filter. So a reduction in the filter in an older person makes all sounds louder, including background noise. "And therefore, speech is not intelligible when it should be intelligible," Caspary said. "They don't hear a crisp signal. The signal is sloppy." It's important to learn about how aging changes the way chemicals interact in the brain in regulating the filtering effect, he said. Eventually, he said, the brain's "inhibitory system" could be treated with drugs to function like the brain of a young driver, who doesn't need to adjust a car radio's volume as often to hear the music clearly. It could be 10 to 20 years before effective drug therapies are developed, but the pace of discovery doesn't discourage Caspary. "Science almost always moves in baby steps," he said. "I personally accepted that a long, long time ago." One fertile area for potential drug treatments involves tinnitus, a medical condition that causes people to hear ringing in the ears or noise in the head when no external source is present. Brozoski and Bauer, working in collaboration with Caspary and others at SIU, were the first scientists in the world to demonstrate in an animal model the brain changes that occur at the single-cell level as a result of tinnitus.
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   Other research from Caspary's group has been used by pharmaceutical companies in developing patents for potential drugs to treat age-related hearing loss. "The bottom line is that when we first proposed pharmacotherapy for age-related hearing loss, we were chuckling to ourselves," Caspary said.