In America, cerebral malaria isn’t typically on most patients’ vaccination checklist. But in African countries such as Malawi, where MSU has brought relief efforts for the past 25 years, the disease, usually found in children, kills thousands each year.
“It’s a huge killer, but the crazy thing is that it’s treatable,” MSU professor of osteopathic medical specialties Karl Seydel said. “But we can’t treat kids fast enough, we can’t get them in the hospital quick enough.”
For survivors, the disease can carry neurological damage, such as blindness, epilepsy, motor disabilities and behavioral disorders. A team of MSU researchers recently has created a digital device called NeuroInterp html, which tracks the damage of the disease through a series of questionnaires compared with a patient’s MRI results.
Khalid Ibrahim, an informatics specialist at MSU’s Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, said the device also gives experts a database to compare patients with their own progress as well as the conditions of other patients.
“It opens a huge platform of research,” Ibrahim said. “They can do a study in one place and compare subjects in another place. They can compare (results) to the same subject and across subjects.”
The deciding factor between what children end up with neurological damage is the presence of parasites in the bloodstream, MSU neurology professor Doug Postels said.
“Children with cerebral malaria fall into two major subsections in their retinal findings: some are retinopathy positive and some are negative,” Postel said. “For children who are positive, the mortality rate is about 15 percent. One-third of those children who survive end up with neurological trauma, from mental retardation and cerebral palsy to blindness or deafness.”
Although the survival rate has gone up, many families don’t have the means to care for the disability the child could be left with. Seydel said the device could lead to more accommodation for the 32 percent of survivors who end up with significant brain damage.
“We’re getting better at keeping people alive, but there are more neurological disabilities,” he said. “There are not too many schools for them if they are blind, and there’s no support network for the family. That’s a huge life-changer for a family, and many of them don’t survive because the parents can’t take care of them.”
Seydel said the device could not only bring to advancement for MSU, but offer solutions to other neurological diseases worldwide.
“(MSU wants) to be a global university, and they definitely have shown that in many ways,” he said. “It’s becoming more and more of a smaller global community than people are realizing, and we need to put efforts on both sides of the ocean.”
Despite the bigger picture of how NeuroInterp will be used, Ibrahim said the best reward comes from seeing its impact in Africa.
“It’s incredible to see how the tool is being used in the field in Malawi,” Ibrahim said. “When you have that bigger picture of how the tool can be used, it just feels good.”
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