News Releases

Douglas H. Smith, MD, the Robert A. Groff Professor of Neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has received a $4-million, four-year PACT (PA Consortium on Traumatic Brain Injury) award from the Pennsylvania Department of Health to lead a multi-institution effort to transform the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of traumatic brain injury.

The first child to undergo a successful hand transplant also is the first child in whom scientists have detected massive changes in how sensations from the hands are represented in the brain.

Testing drugs to prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer’s dementia and using them in the clinic will mean identifying and informing adults who have a higher risk of Alzheimer’s but are still cognitively normal.

Seven years ago, Penn Medicine researchers showed that mutations in the TMEM106B gene significantly increased a person’s risk of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), the second most common cause of dementia in those under 65.