OU Professor Makes Strides in Iron
Michael Wenger
Michael Wenger, an experimental and mathematical psychologist at the University of Oklahoma, began working in neuroscience 15 years ago. He was studying the basic aspects of visual perception and memory at Pennsylvania State University when a colleague approached him with a proposal.
“He had been developing an animal model of the effects of iron deficiency on the brain and behavior and wanted to translate it to humans,” Wenger explained. “At that point in time, the medical practice didn’t focus on iron deficiency until it became anemia. What my friend was finding in the animal model is there was substantial impairment in learning and memory. He wanted to find out if the same thing could be true in humans.”
Wenger began his research in India, where he focused on the effects of using a new type of salt to alleviate anemia.
“We went and ran the study with two groups of women that cooked and ate with a regular iodized salt and then another one that cooked and ate with a salt that was additionally fortified with iron,” said Wenger. “What we found was that everyone’s blood level improved, but the women who ate the salt that was fortified with iron, their perceptual ability improved, their memory improved, their ability to control attention improved and not in small ways.”
In August of 2010 Wenger joined OU, where he was awarded a grant to study behavior and brain measurements, as well as metabolic measurements.
“More than 45% of the women that came through [our study] were iron deficient, anemic or both,” Wenger said. “Some research published by a colleague of mine at Penn State suggests that if you are in that state, you are losing between one-half and three-quarters of a GPA over four years (the difference between graduating with an A or B average). GPA predicts your earning potential so it could be a substantial loss of income.”
Today, Wenger’s research continues, and recently two undergraduate students who have been assisting him were able to attend the 2019 Neuroscience Conference in Chicago. While there, Ayesha Sajid and Trace Lawson had the opportunity to network with other people in their field and present their research in poster form.
Ayesha Sajid
“For me, the conference highlighted the immense applicability of neuroscience; there were ample opportunities to network, spanning a variety of disciplines, fusing with underlying scientific principles they all had in common,” said Sajid, a junior psychology major who plans to attend medical school. “It helped bring the work I had been putting in since freshman year to life and it also helped me connect our studies with thematically similar works.”
The students that had been helping Wenger, including Sajid, were responsible for data processing, screening participants and measuring EEGs. The students were able to sum up their research and then present it in poster form, under Wenger’s guidance.
“The research we have been doing has been in the works for quite a few years, for which I have been a part of since my freshman year; it’s been a hugely consistent part of my collegiate journey,” said Sajid. “Dr. Wenger has been an incredible source of guidance to me and has opened up doors to research that truly interests me. My experience with him has been nothing but positive, and I am immensely grateful for the opportunity to study iron deficiency and its neural implications.”
Currently, Wenger and his team are focused on multiple projects, including research on iron deficiency tests in the eye and two projects with the OU Health Sciences Center – the first of which examines the role of iron deficiency in smoking cessation, and the other which explores the hypotheses that accumulation of iron on the brain is one of the bases for neurodegenerative disease.
The OU Visual Neuroscience Laboratory
