Erin Edwards grew up a prolific athlete, passionate about activity and bodily exercise. It was not till her grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s that she started out pondering about the science powering workout and the mind.
“I grew to become fascinated in how training demonstrates many persuasive hyperlinks to improving the excellent of life of people with neurologic disorders,” the fifth-calendar year doctoral scholar in the Wayne Condition University Faculty of Drugs explained. “A great deal was becoming figured out, but nevertheless so significantly was unidentified.”
Wanting to know extra, she researched neuroscience as an undergraduate at the College of New England the place she ran cross-place for the NCAA.
The awareness she gleaned these initial few yrs in higher training advanced into exploration concerns. She enrolled in the Translational Neuroscience Plan in the Office of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences to find the answers and chose to get the job done with Nora Fritz, Ph.D., associate professor of Neurology and director of the Neuroimaging and Neurorehabilitation Laboratory to examine the connections between motion, wondering and the brain. Dr. Fritz is also an associate professor of Bodily Treatment in the Division of Health and fitness Treatment Sciences at the Eugene Applebaum School of Pharmacy and Wellness Sciences.
“We leverage this knowledge to boost focused rehabilitation therapies aimed at improving both equally clinically observable operate and underlying mind pathology in people with numerous sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases,” explained Edwards, who offers her dissertation March 4 and is scheduled to graduate this semester.
Edwards in particular studies backward strolling as a novel biomarker of drop danger, cognitive drop and fundamental brain destruction in folks with MS. Dr. Fritz had formerly examined how backward going for walks detects fall hazard in the aged. Jointly, they determined that backward going for walks managed the same efficacy to detect falls in persons with MS, she claimed, but why it functions so properly as a detection strategy remained mysterious.
“Dr. Fritz and I understood that if we could target the fundamental variables driving the efficacy of backward strolling to detect falls,” Edwards claimed, “we could probably establish other promising neural targets for drop chance detection and acquire individualized rehabilitation therapies to decrease disorder progression and boost quality of lives for folks with MS.”
For the duration of Edwards’s stint as a doctoral pupil in the lab, she has assisted in the growth and execution of medical trials investigating how physical exercise impacts the MS group in Detroit.

“Seeing our study members considerably enhance their motion, imagining, self esteem and total high quality of existence has genuinely been inspiring.”
Edwards gained very first place with that research in the 2021 3MT at the Graduate Study Symposium for her presentation “Backward going for walks as a novel marker of drop threat in multiple sclerosis.”
The Fritz lab is conducting a scientific trial that Edwards explained is seeing great observable outcomes.
“Hearing, ‘I truly feel like I don’t even have MS any more!’ from a participant leaves your coronary heart total and your enthusiasm to continue on onward even greater,” she explained.
However, there is a great deal a lot more to study about backward walking and its use as an evaluation resource and work out general when it comes to strengthening neurological conditions, she mentioned.
These are issues she aims to explore soon after she graduates and moves to a place as a medical science liaison, or MSL, in MS therapeutic practice.
“MSLs are the pipeline amongst research development and scientific software, and I truly simply cannot hold out to be a section of a crew that is so passionate about the sufferers in which we treatment so a lot about,” she mentioned.