image: This is a healthy person. view more
Credit: UEF
With every heartbeat, the blood is sent to all our peripheral tissues, generating changes in pulsatile perfusion. Using these pulsatile changes as a source of information, researchers at the University of Eastern Finland have developed a new method of 2D mapping of microcirculation, called BPI (Blood Pulsation Imaging). The aim is to use the pulsatile vascular changes detected with BPI for diagnostic purposes.
The research consortium comprising physicists, physiologists and neurobiologists was coordinated by Professor Rashid Giniatullin at A. I. Virtanen Institute. In two recent articles published in PLOS ONE they described new vascular phenomena detected with the BPI technique. One of these studies found that there are so-called 'hot spots' with high amplitude of pulsatile changes which reflect high variability of microcirculation detected by this technique (Kamshilin et al., 2013). The other study showed that there are transverse blood pulsation waves in the faces of migraine patients, whereas in healthy people such waves are symmetrical as shown in the figure below (Zaproudina et al., 2013). The latter finding was received with excitement by specialists, as was evidenced from the feedback of the recent lecture of R. Giniatullin at Scandinavian Pain Conference in Helsinki.
This discovery demonstrated a major difference in the timing of lateralized blood supply (asynchronous supply) to the faces of healthy individuals and migraine sufferers. The main focus of Professor Giniatullin's research group are cellular and molecular mechanisms of migraine in animal models, but their recent discoveries made in human beings are creating a bridge between fundamental and clinical migraine studies by opening new perspectives for prediction, diagnosis and, likely, for monitoring the efficiency of anti-migraine medicines.
The work with migrainers was performed by Dr. Nina Zaproudina and Professor Matti Närhi of the Institute of Dentistry and Institute of Biomedicine (Physiology) whereas the technological development of BPI was done by the group of Professor Alexei Kamshilin and thermographic studies by group of Professor Pasi Karjalainen from the Department of Applied Physics. Consortium includes also the group of Professor Olli Gröhn from AIVI which contributes to migraine studies using a powerful fMRI approach (Shatillo et al., 2013). These multidisciplinary studies demonstrated that the UEF has a good potential to become a significant center for experimental headache studies.
For further information, please contact: Professor Rashid Giniatullin, tel. +358 403553665, rashid.giniatullin (at) uef.fi
Original articles:
Kamshilin AA, Teplov V, Nippolainen E, Miridonov S, Giniatullin R. (2013) Variability of microcirculation detected by blood pulsation imaging. PLOS ONE. 2013;8(2):e57117. Doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0057117
Zaproudina N, Teplov V, Nippolainen E, Lipponen J, Kamshilin A, Närhi M, Karjalainen P and Giniatullin R. (2013) Asynchronicity of Facial Blood Perfusion in Migraine. PLOS ONE, 2013:8(12):e80189. Doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0080189
Shatillo A, Koroleva K, Giniatullina R, Naumenko N, Slastnikova AA, Aliev RR, Bart G, Atalay M, Gu C, Khazipov R, Davletov B, Grohn O, Giniatullin R. (2013) Cortical spreading depression induces oxidative stress in the trigeminal nociceptive system. Neuroscience, 253C:341-349. Doi: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2013.09.002
Journal
PLoS ONE