Dr. Martin Schuhmann, a neurosurgeon from Germany, has recently joined our team as Research Scholar. He is on leave from Hannover Medical School, where he has completed 8 years with Professor Madjid Samii, M.D., one of the most skilled and well-known neurosurgeons in the world and Honorary President of the World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies. During his pediatric neurosurgical training with Marcos Tatagiba, M.D. Ph.D., Associate Professor of Neurosurgery in Hannover, Dr. Schuhmann became so interested in pediatric neurosurgery that he accepted our invitation to spend a year of intensified clinical and scientific work in this important field. During his neurosurgical residency, Dr. Schuhmann also earned his Ph.D. from Hannover Medical School for his investigations of focal traumatic brain injury, which involves many of the same damage mechanisms seen in hydrocephalus.

Dr. Schuhmann has a great interest in the pathophysiology of hydrocephalus and in solving the multitude of related problems for its treatment. He has begun a collaboration with Marek Czosnyka, Ph.D., a well-known expert in shunt assessment and CSF flow from Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, England. Dr. Czosnyka and his colleagues have developed a shunt testing system in the laboratory to determine the performance of many CSF drainage valves under different testing conditions. To make the laboratory results more realistic for shunt function in a hydrocephalic patient, the group also developed a novel "human compliance simulator", which has enabled shunt testing under conditions which generally exist in the human. Dr. Schuhmann has gained additional experience in computerized long-time monitoring of intracranial pressure in hyrdocephalic patients before shunting or with suspected shunt dysfunction. He plans to correlate the sophisticated patterns of intracranial pressure traces to the clinical symptoms of the patient.

Most of Dr. Schuhmann's previous experimental research has been focused on animal models of traumatic brain injury. Using a model of focal cortical brain injury, he and his group investigated post-traumatic metabolic changes by means of proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy using a MRI modified for small animals. These changes were combined with a wide range of immunhistochemical investigations to create a cellular basis for interpretation of the changes seen in spectroscopy. Specifically, his interest has been in the post-traumatic changes of leukotrienes, which are proteins that are involved in brain edema and inflammation. Dr. Schuhmann has developed some of the first treatment strategies for reducing brain damage related to leukotrienes. Since the CSF can be a "mirror" for brain function, Dr. Schuhmann has also begun to measure changes in the peptide content (peptides are small protein molecules with important biological function) of the CSF. He has produced, in close cooperation with the company BioVisioN of Hannover, a leader in blood peptide display and analysis (Peptidomics ™), the first exhaustive maps of CSF peptides. This analysis has displayed about 5000 peptide structures in human CSF. The ultimate goal in this research is to identify patterns of peptide changes which are unique for a given disease and which can be used in diagnosis or treatment. The first applications of these techniques have been in the areas of brain tumors and experimental traumatic brain injury, but they can be readily applied to hydrocephalus.

Dr. Schuhmann's work at the Children's Hospital of Michigan will focus on creating a elaborate data bank to enhance the possibilities of scientific analysis, especially for the large number of hydrocephalus patients which are treated at here every year. Furthermore, he will undertake computerized intracranial pressure monitoring in all cases with questionable symptoms related to hydrocephalus or shunt dysfunction. Dr. Schuhmann will supplement his clinical research with animal experiments conducted in Dr. McAllister's laboratory.

Dr. Schuhmann, his wife Heike, and their daughters Helen (2 1/2) and Rosa (6 months), live in Rochester, MI.

M. U. Schuhmann, M. Engel. L. Runge, M. Samii, T. Brinker: Application of Clinically Recorded ICP Patterns - An Extension of Conventional Shunt Testing Child's Nervous System, 16: 856-861, 2000 (MedLine)