Research
Interests
I graduated in 1993 from the State University
of New York, Health Sciences Center at Brooklyn. I did an internship
at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan and then moved to the Midwest
to pursue a residency in Neurology at the University of Michigan. There,
I did a 2 year clinical fellowship in Geriatric Neurology and then joined
the Institute of Gerontology in order to obtain an additional 2 years
of research training in memory disorders of aging and early Alzheimer's
disease, all at the University of Michigan. I joined the faculty as
an assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at Michigan State
University in July of 2001. Currently, I divide my time beween clinical
care of patients (specializing in neurologic dysfunctions of those over
age 60), and research examining the effects of aging and dementia on
the memory networks of the brain, using functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) and diffusion tensor MRI.
My lab is currently focused on studying
the memory deficits that occur during the transition from normal aging
to Alzheimer's disease (AD). We are studying 3 groups of individuals;
healthy seniors, those with Mild Cognitive Impairment (a diagnosis that
encompasses both memory-predominant and other-cognitive predominant
deficits that are not severe enough to be considered dementia) and those
with early stage AD. We are using event-related fMRI to visualize neural
network differences between successful and unsuccessful learning attempts,
both within and across groups. An offshoot of this work is a study examining
the differences between rapid presentation of to-be-remembered stimuli
(every 2.5 - 7.5 sec) versus traditional event-related presentation
timing (every 15 sec). This latter study is being performed in a population
of young (college-age) subjects.
The second focus of the lab is the use
of a method known as DTI, which allows for evaluation of the integrity
of white matter tracts. It has been established that fractional anisotropy
(a measure of water diffusion along a vector) is decreased during aging
in several major pathways (ie corpus callosum). It is the intention
of this work to delineate whether the fornix (the main outflow pathway
from the hippocampal complex) shows similar changes during aging, and
could be used as a marker early in the process of converting to AD.
Please feel free to contact me if you
have any questions about my research.
Selected
Publications
Search all publications in the NCBI Journal Database
Bozoki, A., Grossman, M., Smith, E. E. (2006) Can patients with
Alzheimer's disease learn a category implicitly?, Neuropsychologia, 44
(5), 816-827
Bozoki A., Purcell J, Zacks R, DeLano M, Symonds L, A Comparison of Two
Methods for Performing Event-related fMRI, NeuroImage, 22(Suppl. 1),
S22-S60, June 2004
Bozoki A., DeLano M, Huang J, Potchen M, Diffusion tensor imaging of the
fornix in Alzheimer's disease, Neurology, 62(7 Suppl. 5), A126, April
2004
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Andrea
C. Bozoki