Jed Barash ’01 has recently been recognized for his work researching amnesia as a component of the opioid epidemic. Barash and other colleagues are researching the patterns of brain damage in cases of addiction.
As the medical director at the Soldiers’ Home health-care facility in Chelsea, Mass., Barash conducts research on the less explored side effects of opioid addiction. The Atlantic wrote a story about Barash, in which it reported his involvement with a string of anterograde amnesia pattern cases in Massachusetts.
The article says that, as a neurologist working at Burlington’s Lahey Hospital and Medical Center, Barash treated a patient suffering from amnesia following a suspected opioid overdose.
He noticed activity in the patient’s hippocampi, a sign of severe, exclusive injury to that area. Joined by his colleagues, Barash began research into the phenomenon.
Barash recently wrote a piece for the New England Journal of Medicine in which he explains how acute amnestic syndrome is associated with fentanyl overdose.
