Penn Research Permits First-Ever Visualization of Psychological Stress in the Human Brain

by Barbara Kram, Editor | March 13, 2006

The study was sponsored by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Air Force. In addition to Drs. Wang and Detre, the team of investigators included Penn researchers Hengyi Rao, Gabriel S. Wetmore, Patricia M. Furlan, Marc Korczykowski, and David F. Dinges.

About Penn Medicine

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PENN Medicine is a $2.7 billion enterprise dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and high-quality patient care. PENN Medicine consists of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System.

Penn's School of Medicine is ranked #2 in the nation for receipt of NIH research funds; and ranked #4 in the nation in U.S. News & World Report's most recent ranking of top research-oriented medical schools. Supporting 1,400 fulltime faculty and 700 students, the School of Medicine is recognized worldwide for its superior education and training of the next generation of physician-scientists and leaders of academic medicine.

The University of Pennsylvania Health System comprises: its flagship hospital, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, consistently rated one of the nation's "Honor Roll" hospitals by U.S. News & World Report; Pennsylvania Hospital, the nation's first hospital; Penn Presbyterian Medical Center; a faculty practice plan; a primary-care provider network; two multispecialty satellite facilities; and home health care and hospice.

Illustration: Schematic diagram illustrates the continuous arterial spin labeling (CASL) method. This technique is very similar to positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, but is entirely non-invasive and does not require injections or radioactivity. In this elegant technique, water molecules in the patient's own blood are 'tagged' by the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) magnet and used as the natural contrast agent in order to measure cerebral blood-flow.

Image Courtesy: Jiongjiong Wang, PhD, and John A. Detre, MD, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

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