Dana Foundation Blog

Dana Foundation on Storify

During last Saturday's Staying Sharp session, we covered the event live using Storify, a program that allows users to pull information from all over the internet—Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.—and assemble it in one place. You can find Dana's Storify post from Staying Sharp here: http://storify.com/dana_fdn/staying-sharp-mount-vernon.

As you can see, the Storify post includes many tweets and photos, listed chronologically, and allows readers to follow the event as if they were there. Towards the end, you can find the panelists' "one important nugget" they shared with the audience.

We will be using Storify again at the next Staying Sharp event in Las Vegas in a few weeks. Stay tuned!

--Andrew Kahn

It’s Brain Awareness Week! Where to go, what to read, what to do

If you read our blog, you’re sure to know that this week is Brain Awareness Week! Coordinated by the Dana Foundation, Brain Awareness Week (BAW) is the global campaign to increase public awareness of the progress and benefits of brain research.

This year, hundreds of events are planned worldwide; check out the Dana Alliance’s International Calendar of Events to look for activities in your area. For our New York readers, be sure to also visit the braiNY website for family lab fairs and workshops, as well as lectures and storytelling. Our staff will be reporting on a number of the New York events on this blog, so stay tuned.

The Dana Foundation homepage this week features special BAW interviews and announcements. Every day, we’ll be posting a new BAW partner interview, which offer great tips on planning science-based events. Today’s Q&A is with Andrea Schierkolk, public programs manager for the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Maryland, which collaborates with universities, government agencies, and hospitals to present a week-long brain-centric program for middle school students. Of the many fun and creative interactive activities, the perpetual favorite is “The Drunken Brain,” presented by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Drug Facts Week Interview: Rob Malenka

It’s a simple fact, but an important one: If you never take a particular drug, you can’t become addicted to it.

Says Dana Alliance member Robert Malenka, M.D., Ph.D., co-director of the Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neurosciences: “You can argue all you want about the chances of developing an addiction, but becoming an addict is a bad life. It is a chronic, relapsing illness that is very challenging to treat. It can become a lifelong battle. As a teenager you have to ask yourself if you want to risk that.”

Professional Athletes and Mental Health

Last summer, Royce White, an aspiring professional basketball player, spoke candidly about his anxiety disorder before the National Basketball Association Draft. Most NBA teams recognized his talent but were hesitant to risk a draft pick on a player who admitted to, among other things, a fear of flying. The Houston Rockets took a chance, selecting White in the first round with the 16^th overall pick.

We are more than two months into the NBA season and White hasn’t played a game. Earlier this week the Rockets announced they had suspended White for “refusing to provide services as required by his contract.” White has said the Rockets are ignoring the advice of mental health professionals and that he won’t go to work until the experts, and not the Rockets, have final say on his medical decisions. It is an unfortunate situation but one that could spur positive changes in the way professional sports leagues deal with mental health issues.

The Epilepsy Conundrum

Robert Gumnit, M.D., founder of the first comprehensive epilepsy center in the United States, says the way patients and doctors deal with seizures is like a comedy routine, except it’s not funny: a man has a seizure and thinks to himself, That’s odd. If it happens again I’ll tell my wife. It happens again, so he tells his wife; she says, That’s odd. If it happens again you should tell a doctor. It does, so he tells his doctor, who might say, I’m not sure what happened to you. Why don’t we wait to see if it happens again?

“As a result,” Gumnit says, “the identification of the patient who needs treatment is delayed, often by many, many years. That puts the patient behind the 8-ball because the more seizures you have, the harder they are to treat.”