Dr. Andres M. Lozano

The MedPage Today article Deep-Brain Stimulation Sparks a Patient’s Memory said

Vivid memories from 30 years earlier suddenly flooded back to a 50-year-old obese patient who was undergoing deep-brain stimulation of the hypothalamus to suppress appetite, researchers here reported.
 
Unexpectedly, three weeks of deep-brain stimulation significantly improved the patient’s memory on verbal and spatial associative tests, reported Andres M. Lozano, M.D., Ph.D., of Toronto Western Hospital, and colleagues online in the Annals of Neurology.
 
This single-patient case study suggested a potential new application for deep-brain stimulation in patients with disorders such as early Alzheimer’s disease, Dr. Lozano said.

Andres M. Lozano, BSc, MD, BMedSci, FRCSC, PhD is Senior Scientist, Division of Brain Imaging & Behaviour Systems – Neuroscience, Toronto Western Research Institute (TWRI).
 
Andres is interested in understanding the causes of Parkinson’s disease and in developing novel treatments. His experiments aim at uncovering the mechanisms through which dopamine neurons die and developing novel strategies to prevent their death using experiments on models of Parkinson’s disease.
 
His second focus is functional neurosurgery. In these studies he aims to improve our understanding of how disruptions in neural activity in the brain of human patients lead to subthalamic nucleus and various areas of the cortex to obtain direct recordings to cellular activity in these nuclei. These approaches help understand the pathogenesis of these disorders and are leading the development of novel treatment strategies.
 
Andres edited Movement Disorder Surgery: Progress and Challenges (Progress in Neurological Surgery), coedited Surgical Treatment of Parkinson’s Disease and Other Movement Disorders (Current Clinical Neurology), and coauthored Bilateral deep brain stimulation of the pedunculopontine and subthalamic nuclei in severe Parkinson’s disease, Posteroventral Medial Pallidotomy in Advanced Parkinson’s Disease, Neuropsychological consequences of chronic bilateral stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus in Parkinson’s disease, Deep Brain Stimulation for Treatment-Resistant Depression, and Expression of the growth-associated protein GAP-43 in adult rat retinal ganglion cells following axon injury. Read the full list of his publications!
 
Andres is a graduate of the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Medicine in 1983, He underwent Neurosurgical Training at McGill University. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada in 1990. During his residency in Montreal, He earned his Ph.D. in Experimental Medicine in 1989. He joined the Neurosurgical Staff at the Toronto Western Hospital in 1991. He is currently Professor in the Department of Surgery, and inaugural Chair Holder of the Ron Tasker Chair in Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery at the University Health Network. He also holds a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Neuroscience.
 
Read New Movement in Parkinson’s and An INTERVIEW with Dr. Andres M. Lozano.