Mr. Hyam will deliver the lecture "Using Surgery to Identify the Neural Anatomy Governing Cardiovascular and Respiratory Function". Central to the lecture will be Mr. Hyam's DPhil and post-DPhil investigations under the supervision of Professor Tipu Aziz FMedSc and Mr. Alexander Green FRCS(SN) at Oxford Functional Neurosurgery, Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, and Functional Neurosurgery and Experimental Neurology, University of Oxford.
Mr. Hyam demonstrated that deep brain stimulation, currently applied to treat neurological conditions such as tremor and Parkinson's disease, could improve lung function in human subjects. He also found that there is a neural signal which can be recorded from the human brain which correlates to the performance of forced respiration within certain deep brain sites. When the sites exhibiting this signal were stimulated, there was an increase in lung function spirometry of up to 30%. This has helped to delineate which sites within the brain contribute to respiratory control which is still poorly understood. It has also raised the possibility of alternative treatment strategies for severe obstructive sleep apnoea or reversible airway diseases such as asthma.
Further, he has found that deep brain stimulation can modify the body's cardiovascular responses to postural challenges such as head-up tilt. Again, this has helped to shed light on the poorly defined neural anatomy controlling blood pressure and vascular control which provides potential targets for novel therapies to treat medically-resistant cardiovascular diseases.
Mr. Hyam is a neurosurgical registrar at the National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery, Queen Square, London, and a visiting academic at Oxford Functional Neurosurgery and the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, University of Oxford. He was awarded his DPhil in 2012 from the Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics.