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I'm going to be in another PD study!  The Udall Parkinson's Center at
Johns Hopkins is doing a study of reaction time in Parkinson's
patients.  Christina (one of the people who were administering the
tests for the Hopkins Longitudinal Study [1]) called me at home
yesterday to ask if I was interested, but all she got was my
answering machine.  Today I called back and agreed to be a victim.

 From what Christina said it's a 3-way study of reaction time.  One of
the sections is the same reaction time test on the laptop that I did
in the Longitudinal Study.  In fact it sounded as if I won't have to
repeat that segment.  Then they hook you up to an EEG and monitor
your brain waves while doing similar reaction time tests.  The third
segment is the most exciting.  It will be testing reaction time while
they monitor my brain functions in a fMRI machine (functional MRI -
they can see segments of the brain light up as they are used).  One
of the many questions Christina asked was if I was claustrophobic.
I'll be spending several hours in the machine.

I quipped that they would probably find that my skull was completely
hollow.  Christina said that is a universal response to a first MRI
of the head - everybody says that!  (And here I thought I was being
original.)

The tests are being run on Wednesdays when they have the fMRI macnine
time.  My appointment is for 2 August.  She will be sending me more
explanatory material soon (by snail-mail presumably).

I'm excited!

Here are some fMRI web pages.  I have yet to find a simple "what-is"
page for fMRI.

     http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fmrianalysis/index.html

     http://www.fmri.org/

     http://128.151.16.162/2nmr.html

     http://crl.ucsd.edu/bilingual/fMRI3.html

Bill


[1] Longitudinal Study: see the 19 May entry in my diary:
     http://bill.innanen.com/parkinsons/diary200005.shtml
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Bill Innanen                     <mailto: [log in to unmask]>
                            <http://Bill.Innanen.com> & <http://mni.ms>