At the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, the brain bank is accepting deposits.
“So that's a bio repository of postmortem brain donations from San Antonio in the Greater South Texas area,” said Kevin Bieniek, PhD, director of the Brain Bank at the Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases.
Bieniek said this biorepository serves two purposes.
“One of them is to provide families with answers and closure a lot of times. Neurodegenerative disorders can be really tricky, and even with really great clinical care, there can be little hidden things that we find in the brain and mixed features of different neurodegenerative diseases. So pathology is kind of the baseline truth, the definitive way to detect and diagnose diseases,” he said.
“And another big motivation for a lot of our donors is everything that we do in this process, everything that we collect, we save that material and we can use it to facilitate research," Bieniek said.
Research into devastating diseases like Parkinson's, ALS, CTE, and Alzheimer’s – an area in which the Biggs bank can make a unique and important contribution to brain research.
“San Antonio and South Texas has not been represented in any of these efforts in the past. So we still are in a space where we can make a lot of really interesting discoveries on Alzheimer's disease by studying the brain, especially in our population, and looking at the risk of Alzheimer's disease in Hispanics."
If brain donation is something you would consider and want to know more, you can find more information here.
Science & Medicine is a collaboration between TPR and The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, about how scientific discovery in San Antonio advances the way medicine is practiced everywhere.
