Dr. Carl L. Faingold, PhD has recently published a book titled Neuronal Networks in Brain Function, CNS Disorders, and Therapeutics with co-editor Hal Blumenfeld, MD, PhD.
Dr. Faingold is a founding faculty member of Southern Illinois University School of Medicine in Springfield, Illinois where he is currently Distinguished Professor in the Department of Pharmacology. He is in his 19th year as department chair. As a member of the American Medical School Pharmacology Chairs (AMSPC) he has taken part in the writing of the AMSPC Knowledge Objectives in Pharmacology and was co-editor with Richard Eisenberg, PhD of the 2012 update and expansion of these pharmacology teaching objectives.
Dr. Faingold’s current book approaches the brain in a unique way, based on neuronal networks and the interactions between them in the intact behaving animal. The 33-chapter book was written by 53 authors from 7 countries and comprises nearly 500 pages. This volume brings together a wide variety of research approaches over many fields in brain research and culminates with proposing a new and global understanding of how CNS drugs may work on neurons in specific network sites in the intact individual. As a pharmacologist, Dr. Faingold emphasizes the critical importance of the correct therapeutic dosage in determining the site and mechanism of CNS drug action.
The early chapters in the book cover the methods used to explore networks in the intact animal or human brain, including brain imaging. The next group of chapters discusses the network control mechanisms, including neurotransmitters and neuron-glia interactions.
The following group of chapters describes the operational mechanisms of specific normal brain networks such as those that mediate hearing and vision. Networks involved in memory and sleep as well as motor movement and pain are also covered. Epilepsy, which is Dr. Faingold’s main research interest, is extensively covered, and the major neuronal mechanisms involved in the ability of the neurons within specific networks to undergo changing patterns of response based on experience are also a major topic. Finally, the neuronal network basis for drug therapy of CNS disorders as well as electrical stimulation therapies, including emergent properties of neurons in the networks, is extensively discussed.
The final chapter brings all this information together in a proposed blueprint for improving the therapy of human CNS disorders based on combined functional magnetic resonance imaging, stimulation and pharmacological treatments based on neuronal network data that Dr. Faingold and Dr. Blumenfeld assert can improve therapy in patients based on an integrated application of the wide array of knowledge that is currently available, as thoroughly documented in this volume.
Dr. Faingold is also a co-editor with Drs. Lynn Wecker, George Dunaway, Lynn Crespo and Stephanie Watts of Brody’s Human Pharmacology (Mosby, 2010). A long-time ASPET member since 1977, Dr. Faingold is primarily affiliated with the Neuropharmacology and Pharmacology Education divisions.