At NYU Langone’s Rusk Rehabilitation, Prin X Amorapanth, MD, PhD, a physician–scientist, examines how neuroplasticity may alleviate functional impairments in people with acquired brain injuries and translates findings into novel neurorehabilitation treatments.

Dr. Amorapanth’s research seeks to identify markers of visuospatial impairment after acquired brain injury as well as noninvasive brain stimulation as both a therapeutic and investigative tool for improving rehabilitation and better understanding the mechanisms of recovery after brain injury.

Early in his career, Dr. Amorapanth helped identify distinct neural circuits in a fear pathway mediating different types of conditioned fear responses. This finding shifted away from the belief that conditioned fear was tied to a single circuit and showed that different areas within the brain, including the amygdala, are involved in fear response. This finding led to further studies that allowed Dr. Amorapanth to develop novel targeted diagnostic and treatment tools for emotional disorders in people with traumatic brain injury.

Dr. Amorapanth is currently investigating transcranial electrical stimulation as an adjunctive therapy for the rehabilitation of cognitive and emotional impairments in people with chronic traumatic brain injuries. His team of researchers assessed subjects with chronic traumatic brain injuries using a number of cognitive, emotional, and physiologic measures before and after transcranial stimulation. Subjects then watched film clips meant to elicit specific emotions and recorded their autonomic nervous system activity, which provided the team with an additional objective measure for assessing emotional responses. The team found that the subjects displayed different patterns of autonomic activity in response to emotional stimuli despite showing no changes in their subjective perceptions of these stimuli.

These changes in autonomic activity correlated with impaired attention as well. Data from this study also suggest a trend toward improved performance on measures of facial affect recognition and orienting attention in chronic traumatic brain injury subjects who received stimulation, as well as very few adverse side effects of stimulation and no adverse medical events.