HEALTH & MEDICINE
WSU alumna employs hiking to
help fellow veterans with brain injuries
June 19, 2018
Erin Cooper, Neuroscience ’17,
wants to help vets with brain injuries discover the healing power of hiking.
By Sylvia Lindman, WSU
Vancouver
VANCOUVER, Wash. – Ten years
ago, as a soldier in Afghanistan, Erin Cooper suffered a traumatic brain injury
and numerous broken bones from a 40-foot fall off a mountain.
Several explosions she had
previously endured compounded the injury. She was in a coma for a while, and
doctors were about to prepare a medical military discharge (as opposed to a
hospital discharge).
To aid in recovery, Cooper took
long hikes in Washington’s Cascade mountain range with her dog. The exercise
changed her life.
“I started hiking with my dog
to get physically better, she said, “and I noticed it helped me mentally.”
Hiking vs. pharmaceuticals
Cooper had seen other friends
with similar injuries who were treated with pharmaceuticals, but those didn’t
seem to help. “The only thing I can think of that separates me from these
friends is that I do a lot of hiking, and I feel better when I hike,” she said.
“So I decided to become a neuroscientist and figure this out so I can help
other people.”
After recovering from her brain
injury, Cooper returned to military service for another six years and started
college online. Working at a lower-paced desk job in Germany, she said, “I
started going to online school in psychology and fell in love with science.”
Having completed her contract
with the Army in 2013, Cooper hiked for two months on the Appalachian Trail to
“put the past behind me.” In 2014, Cooper began attending neuroscience classes
on the WSU Pullman campus. Later, she transferred to WSU Vancouver, earning her
bachelor’s degree in neuroscience in May 2017. While in Pullman, she also
finished the online bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of
Maryland.
The science behind hiking
Well equipped to study the
brain, and hoping to go on to graduate school in neuroscience, Cooper has
launched a research experiment that she calls Pathfinder. She is taking
veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and/or traumatic brain
injury (TBI) on long-distance hikes, collecting saliva before, during and after
the hike to measure how hiking alters the hormones melatonin and cortisol.
“Preliminary results indicate that there is a change in these hormones as
symptoms are alleviated,” Cooper said, “but more research is needed to confirm
these findings.”
She is committed to finding an
alternative to the antipsychotics and other drugs that typically are prescribed
for veterans with TBI and PTSD. “There really is no medicine specifically for
TBI or PTSD,” she said. “There are things that mask the symptoms but don’t
treat the causes.” Cooper is particularly appalled at the frequent mixing of
psychiatric drugs, which she believes can further damage the minds of those
with TBI or PTSD, sometimes leading to depression and suicide.
Professional, financial support
Cooper started a GoFundMe page
to raise money to take people hiking. Steve Sylvester, associate professor of
molecular biosciences at WSU Vancouver, donated some supplies, and she dipped
into her own pocket to buy an analysis kit. With those resources she was able
to take her first scientific hike with a fellow veteran in the summer of 2017,
and Sylvester again stepped in to help her analyze saliva samples.
“We noticed an intriguing
change,” she said. “I would like to replicate this with a larger subject pool,
and that’s where I am now.”
Cooper has high praise for
Sylvester, as well as Allison Coffin, associate professor of neuroscience, who
helped her improve her ability to present her story in an effort to raise money
and get other scientists involved. “The logistics of hiking are a little more
costly than I’d originally thought,” Cooper said. Sample analysis alone costs
$300 per person.
Everyone who Cooper has taken
on long-distance hikes, she said, show “the change from beginning to end,” she
said. “They’ve been on medications for months or years with no improvement. I
take them on a hike, and all of a sudden they’re smiling again, talking to strangers,
able to make decisions and weigh options, just better able to connect the dots
in their day-to-day life.”
Cooper currently lives on
Anderson Island in Puget Sound. She plans two week-long hikes this year. She
has been hired to work as a lab technician at the Veterans Administration in
Seattle.
Effects of environment,
activities
In her formal fundraising
letter, Cooper explains why long-distance hiking is so effective. “It doesn’t
target just one aspect of brain function, like medication; instead it
replicates the environment our brains and bodies evolved in, thereby allowing
environmental cues to regulate multiple signaling pathways, including hormone
regulation.
“Hormone regulation is
essential to moods, brain function and protein synthesis. By showing that these
levels change as symptoms are alleviated, new therapies may be developed to
treat PTSD and TBI specifically. Imagine a generation of soldiers who would be
able to heal from the effects of war without being overmedicated.”
Erin Cooper’s work can be
supported by donating to the WSU Vancouver Science Fund
and marking the donation for
the Sylvester Lab/Pathfinder, or by visiting her GoFundMe site
////////////////////
NCAA eases restrictions on
transfers: How the legislation could benefit the Pac-12
By Jon Wilner, San Jose Merc
News
PUBLISHED: June 19, 2018 at
7:38 am | UPDATED: June 19, 2018 at 7:59 am
* The following commentary
appeared recently in the Hotline newsletter and has been republished (and
updated) here for readers who missed the original …
The NCAA announced two
significant pieces of legislation last week, both intended to (get this)
benefit student athletes:
* On transfers:
Beginning this fall, players
can simply notify schools of their intent to leave, instead of having to
request permission.
(Coaches, in other words, have
lost the authority to limit movement.)
* On eligibility:
Players can participate in a
maximum of four games in any season without losing that year of eligibility.
(The so-called ‘redshirt
rule.’)
The end result of the
legislation, if not immediately then over time, will be to increase the
quantity of undergraduate transfers each winter/spring:
Allowing true freshmen to
participate in four games gives athletes and coaches alike a better sense for
depth charts, both within that season and in the years to come.
Finding opportunities elsewhere
will become much easier, thanks to the legislation.
As soon as the school is
notified of a player’s intent to transfer, the name gets added to a national
database and the feeding frenzy for services begins.
(Transfers would still be
required to sit out one year of competition, and limitations could be placed on
in-conference movement.)
The new world order feels like
an opportunity for the Pac-12.
Rare is the athlete who
encounters obstacles and decides to move farther away from his support system;
when players transfer, they typically return to their home city or region.
The Hotline examined the
top-200 prospects in the football recruiting classes of 2017 and 2018, per
247sports. (Yes, that’s a limited sample size, although not excessively so.)
Of those 400:
* Twenty-one players attended
high school within the Pac-12 footprint but opted to sign with other Power Five
conferences.
* Five players from outside the
footprint signed with Pac-12 teams.
(I defined the footprint as any
state with a Pac-12 school, plus Nevada and Hawaii — but not Idaho.)
Let’s not overreach and presume
a flood of 5-stars with west coast roots will instantly leave Ohio State and
Alabama in favor of Pac-12 schools.
But the net flow of talent, in
a broad sense, could work in the conference’s favor:
The pool of players who could
seek an opportunity to come home (into the conference) is greater than the pool
of players who could opt to leave for home (depart the conference.)
Call it the unintended
consequences of getting beat in recruiting.
Or something like that.
/////
Pullman considers going
electric
City council scheduled to
discuss plans to replace transit fleet with electric buses
By Scott Jackson, Moscow
Pullman Daily June the 19th, 2018
Pullman Transit could begin
replacing its fleet with electric buses as soon as 2020 if the city council
agrees to move forward.
During tonight's regular
meeting, council members are scheduled to discuss implementing the change,
which transit officials say is essential for meeting state mandates and for
accessing grant funds necessary for purchasing new buses.
Pullman Transit Manager Wayne
Thompson said with funding avenues for older diesel and hybrid buses drying up,
moving toward electric is becoming more and more necessary.
"The availability of money
is almost exclusively for the electric (buses) at this point," Thompson
said. "We've always relied on grant funding to help with the cost of
buses, and what we're seeing is that grant funding is not available for diesels
pretty much at all; even for the hybrid, it's really tough."
Thompson said Pullman Transit
typically relies on grants to support about 80 percent of the cost of a new
bus, with the rest coming from the department's reserve funds.
He said if the council approves
the change, the first step will be to move forward with a grant application for
funds to support a new electric bus charging station and the city's first fully
electric bus.
Thompson said at its slowest,
Pullman Transit would be able to purchase at least one new bus every two years,
but he warns even after purchasing a new bus, it typically takes a year to
arrive. Thompson said the city's newest hybrid - and last if the plan moves
forward - was just ordered and is expected to arrive next year.
"To replace the whole
fleet, we're looking at more than a decade," Thompson said. "It will
be bus by bus, and they will be (decommissioned) just as the buses reach the
end of their current life cycle - we wouldn't replace any bus unnecessarily at
this point. They're a pretty high price tag."
While most buses are expected
to last around 10 to 15 years, Thompson said it is difficult to know if
electric buses can match the lifespan of the vehicles they will be phasing out
- including some diesel buses that have been in service since 1993. According
to Thompson, a new electric bus costs around $800,000, compared to about
$650,000 for a new diesel-electric hybrid.
While the initial cost can seem
daunting, Thompson said maintenance and upkeep is substantially less over the
lifespan of an electric vehicle.
"When we looked at the
long-term life cycle costs, electric was the less expensive to do over the life
of the bus, even without high purchase price," Thompson said. "It's
expensive, but it's the only legitimate option we have, unless the city can pay
for buses on its own."
::::::::::::::
Grip on Sports: WSU’s Mike
Leach shows once again social media is not his best friend
Tue., June 19, 2018, 8:09 a.m.
By Vince Grippi Spokane S-R
A GRIP ON SPORTS • Mike Leach
has picked up a lot of wins the past few years in Pullman. But he suffered
another loss over the weekend and it had little to do with football. Read on.
• If we wanted to be succinct
and to the point, this column would consist of one declarative sentence: Mike
Leach needs to stay off Twitter.
But we are rarely succinct,
never to the point and only occasionally show self-control, so we are probably
the perfect person to explain why.
Sooner or later everyone tweets
out something they shouldn’t have.
If you have a low profile, it
doesn’t really matter. Joe Cool can tweet out his debatable thoughts about
anything and only his 17 followers may care. And they all probably agree with
him.
But if you are a major college
football coach, what you tweet does matter. Tweet the wrong thing and it can
cause irreparable harm to your program and make it harder to do the main thing
you were hired to do, win football games.
College football coaches make
their living in America’s living rooms. At least it begins there. Players
matter, more so than Xs and Os. Anything that makes it harder to attract
players to your school hurts the program. And an untoward tweet fits that
category.
Forgot a minute what the tweet
might be about. Forget for today that Leach, a unabashed supporter of the
president of the United States, tweeted a link to a doctored video that makes a
former president look evil. Put that aside for a moment. Just realize, in this
day and age, any tweet that comes close to touching on the divisions in our
society is going to cause a reaction, not just in Pullman or the Palouse or the
Inland Northwest or Washington. It will cause a reaction everywhere, from
Cambodia to Key West. Such is the power of social media.
And it doesn’t go away. Ever.
Which is where the subject of
Leach’s most recent tweet storm comes in. Again, we are not touching on the
social aspects of the tweet, there are others who are more qualified than I –
and wrote about it today. We are staying in our lane, the one that takes us to
football success. And this tweet is a truck-swallowing pothole on that road.
Many of the players Mike Leach
wants to attract to Pullman believe in the ideals embodied by Barack Obama. So
do their families. His presidency was a watershed moment in this country’s
history and he holds a special place for many Americans.
The video Leach referenced in
his tweet Sunday night was created long ago in an obvious attempt to undermine
the Obama legacy.
Even if Leach’s only goal was
what he said it was, to get a discussion going about the role of government in
our society, his choice of the video was tone-deaf at best. How about just
quoting Henry David Thoreau and his premise the best government is that which
governs least to kick off the discussion?
I’m pretty sure Leach won’t
ever lose a recruit over their love of Emerson instead of Thoreau, but he may
lose one – or more – over the doctored Obama video.
And that’s the bottom line with
his Twitter use. For every recruit he touches in a positive way, tweets like
Sundays touch even more in a negative way. Any cost-benefit analysis would
conclude the risk isn’t worth the reward.
Especially after 5 p.m. on a
Sunday evening.
Leach has always done things differently
as Washington State’s football coach. Every policy the Cougars have in place
that rubs folks outside the program the wrong way is there for one reason: To
help the team succeed. At least that’s Leach’s explanation.
From secrecy about injuries to
how the program is preparing for games, from starters to strategy, Leach defers
answers because, he’s said, he wants to keep a competitive advantage. If that’s
the real reason, fine.
Then don’t undermine the
program, don’t undercut your ability to attract recruits, don’t make it harder
to win by doing something untoward on social media.
To be succinct and to the
point: Mike Leach needs to stay off Twitter.
WSU: As we said above, the
non-football aspect of Leach’s tweet is better handled by others. Jim Camden
covers the particulars of the controversy and Shawn Vestal delves into what
Leach’s tweet storm means in a broader context. … Other voices, from Cougfan to
Deadspin to the Seattle Times and beyond, waded into the fray. … Around the
Pac-12, the evolving media landscape will be important to the conference. …
