In conjunction with National Concussion Awareness Day and National Traumatic Brain Injury Awareness Month, the ANA talks with Ramon R. Diaz-Arrastia, MD, PhD, Director of the Traumatic Brain Injury Clinical Research Center at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In this month’s ANA Q&A Membership Spotlight, we interviewed Beau M. Ances, MD, PhD, MSc who talks about the research that has gone into HIV medicine, cognitive issues for those who are HIV positive and getting older, and how his lab’s work can be used to study the COVID-19 virus.

For Alzheimer's and Brain Awareness Month, ANA interviewed Dr. Dongming Cai, an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Staff Physician for James J. Peters VA Medical Center.

What does the public need to understand about Alzheimer's disease that it often doesn’t?

"We are currently undergoing a significant shift in the way in which we conduct clinical trials for the ALS population. Increasing recognition of cohort enrichment, where a more homogeneous treatment group is identified, is more evident today and greatly increases our ability to find effective treatments."

"I hope that more young neurologists and neuroscientists will consider an academic career in global neurology, which is so important at the current time, and join the fight against neurological manifestations of various viral outbreaks." 

"There are a lot of areas in neurology that are pretty stable and very important, still, but traumatic brain injury in neurology is an area of growth and a lot of young neurologists are quite interested in this area. There’s a lot of opportunity; there’s still a huge unmet need."

~David Brody, M.D., Ph.D, Professor of Neurology

"One hears a lot about malaria deaths, but the sad reality is that a third of survivors sustain a brain injury with associated neurological sequelae. More than 200,000 African children each year end up with neurodisabilities from malaria.

"The most important thing in global health work is collaborating with a team of people, often in the country that you’re working in. And that means not only the doctors there but also nurses, research staff, other people in the hospital, and the patients.

"Cerebrovascular disease is probably one area in neurology where the greatest advances in treatment and diagnosis have happened over the past few years. " 

- Magdy Selim, MD, PhD, Professor of Neurology at Harvard University