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Researcher mixes toys, technology to track infant brains
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Published: March 21, 2009
Updated: 03/21/2009 03:00 pm
KANNAPOLIS — Carol Cheatham has a foam mannequin head sitting on her desk.
At first glance, it looks like the mannequin is wearing a hair net, but look closer and you see it is really a sensor net with rat tail wires trailing behind.
This is what Cheatham uses to read the electrical impulses in infants' brains.
All around her office are toys she uses to gauge the cognitive and memory function of her young participants.
In comparison to the advanced equipment found in the Core Research Laboratory, the simple toys seem relatively low-fi.
But they serve an important purpose to her research.
Cheatham, 50, is a researcher at the UNC Nutrition Research Institute at the North Carolina Research Campus. She and her 15-year-old daughter, Stevie Ray Wonder, moved from Kansas in August 2008 to Kannapolis, when Cheatham began her appointment at UNC-Chapel Hill.
"I've never been in a place where I thought I would be there for a long time," Cheatham said.
She and Stevie Ray bought their first house in the Shady Brook neighborhood of Kannapolis.
Cheatham said she planned for old age when looking for a house.
"It's all one story," she said. "I plan on being here for a long time."
A positive sentiment coming from a self-described "hometown mountain girl" from Wyoming, who has been practicing science just about all her life.
Dynamic duo
As a child, Cheatham said she was curious about the world and that curiosity manifested itself through simple scientific experiments.
"I would take a notebook and follow around the cats to see where they would have their babies,"she said. "My first real experiment was when I transplanted some baby kosher weeds from the sunshine into the shade near the house."
Not something you want to do to your mother — transplanting the weeds closer to the house, she said.
Cheatham began her academic career later than most scientists. She went back to school at age 35, attended the University of Wyoming and graduated with a psychology degree.
"By then, I knew exactly what I wanted to do," she said. "There was no trying to figure what my major was."
From Wyoming, she went to the University of Minnesota for graduate school. She worked at the Institute for Child Development, the number one place for early development research, Cheatham said.
"If you needed to ask a question, you didn't have to call across the country," she said, "There were experts right down the hall."
While there, a researcher, Megan Gunnar, took on Cheatham as a student.
"Carol is an extremely creative and insightful scientist," Gunnar said. "Success in science also requires the capacity to work extremely hard, persevere and multi-task; all strengths of Carol's."
At the same time, Cheatham was a single mom, raising Stevie Ray. During her childhood, Stevie Ray became a test subject for her mother and her colleagues at Minnesota.
"She used me for a lot of things, to test out props, to see if the kids would be able to use them or if they would break," Stevie Ray said. "Her friends in graduate school would use me a lot in their experiments, and I would always get a prize. It was a lot of fun, because I was little back then."
Stevie Ray was so involved with the research that when Cheatham received her doctoral degree, the students in the lab made Stevie Ray a diploma, said Gunnar.
"She really was a terrific trouper, and really quite young when Carol started graduate school," Gunnar said.
It was at Minnesota where Cheatham started coming up with props and toys to test infants' memory.
Sandra Wiebe, one of Cheatham's colleagues at the U of M, worked on memory development with Cheatham. They would use the toys to record normal brain development in infants.
Wiebe said working with Cheatham was great.
"When you are excited about the research, it's nice to work with people that are just as excited," Wiebe said. "You feel like you are doing important work."
Cheatham took a post-doctoral appointment at the University of Kansas in 2004, where she worked on an omega-3 fatty acid study at the K.U. Medical Center.
"I was paid to work on this nutrition study, and I had a lab back at campus where I did my other research," Cheatham said. "The nutrition started taking over, and I realized this is where I could make a difference.
I can figure out what kids need to be eating and actually go out and feed them," she said.
An announcement on a list-serv Cheatham subscribed described a brain development position at the UNC Nutrition Research Institute, a new center at the North Carolina Research Campus.
Since the institute's focus was on individualized nutrition, Cheatham's work fit in with the mission.
She applied, won the position and drove into town Aug. 1, 2008.
Brain food
Cheatham's lab takes up most of a hallway on the first floor of the UNC building at the research campus. There, in the observation rooms, she will watch how infants react to stimuli and record the electrical impulses in the brain.
Cheatham is a development cognitive neuroscientist — which means she studies how the brain processes information.
"I started out as a specialist in infant memory and attention — the development of infant memory and attention," Cheatham said. "As I went along, I saw that my research needed to be something more concrete, something to make a difference."
She added a nutrition component to her research, looking at the effects of omega-3 essential fatty acids in a child's diet on brain development.
First, a quick brain anatomy and physiology lesson: The brain is made up of neurons, which are specialized cells that transmit information between each other. Groups of these cells clump together in different regions of the brain to control different bodily functions, such as thought, speech and motor skills.
Each neuron is coated with a layer of fatty acids — the omega-3 acids. The fatty acids control the information that travels between neurons.
There are two omega-3 acids Cheatham is studying — Docosahexaenoic acid, commonly known as DHA and alpha-Linolenic acid. DHA is found in fish oil and alpha-Linolenic acid is found in flaxseed and walnuts, Cheatham said.
DHA is found in the fatty coatings that surround neurons and facilitate what gets in and out of the cell.
"If the omega-3s are the DHA, then things can move in and out more easily," Cheatham said. "At least the way I think about it ... if things are moving more readily and better, things are going to happen more quickly. Speed of processing in a developing brain is important."
Processing speed affects everything, including memory and cognition. Those are two vital functions neuroscientists track when studying brain development.
Cheatham works primarily with infants and toddlers — whose brains are development quickly. Many of the participants she recruits are too young to speak.
That's where the toys come in.
"To test memory and attention, I have to have pre-verbal task because they can't tell me if they remember," Cheatham said.
The toys are simple and usually have two or three steps to operate. There is a gong and the child has to hang the gong on a crossbar and them bang it with a hammer.
There is a slot-action toy, where the child places a coin in a slot, pushes the slot until the coin drops and rolls out the side of the toy.
"I have several little events, two-step events, little novel events they've never seen before ... and then see if they can imitate what I did," Cheatham said.
Since humans can synthesize DHA through a metabolic process, she wants to know if a child can make enough DHA from alpha-Linolenic acid for healthy brain development by eating more flaxseed oil, which is cheaper and potentially healthier
than fish oil.
"Hopefully, when we get to the flaxseed oil study, that we'll see that flaxseed oil is sufficient to get the DHA into the brain and we don't need to be pumping all this fish into kids, we can just feed them plants," Cheatham said.
Cheatham is about to begin two studies and needs about 200 babies to participate.
"I'm getting a little nervous," she said. "I haven't seen too many pregnant women walking around in Kannapolis."
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