Summary of Research
I have a particular interest in veterinary clinical neuroscience research with a focus on clinicopathological correlates.
Clinicopathological correlates represent the link between pathological lesions and clinical signs, and are the basis of understanding the aetiopathogenesis of any disease.
• The identification that the ptosis shown by equine grass sickness cases is due to loss of palpebral sympathetic innervation led directly to the development of a effective, widely used diagnostic test.
• We recently showed that recovered cases of this disease have normal gastrointestinal motility with almost no neurons in their enteric nervous system, raising fascinating questions as to the function of the interstitial cells of Cajal.
• The accepted hypothesis that the chromatolytic somatic lower motor neurons in grass sickness cases are degenerating, can be rejected if muscle from grass sickness cases turns out to be normal: this may lead to new aetiologic agents being considered.
• Although the clinical signs of equine recurrent laryngeal neuropathy remains are well described, the distribution of histopathological lesions are not well understood and are likely to hold the key to the cause of this prominent equine disease.
• We are currently using neurophysiology techniques to study the clinicopathological correlates of neurodegenerative diseases such as ovine scrapie and neurolipofuscinosis (Batten’s disease): this will help clarify the link between lesions and clinical signs in these devastating diseases, and could be used to monitor the effects of therapeutic interventions in human patients.