Handbook of Medical Neuropsychology (PDF)

Carol L. Armstrong is a neuropsychologist with the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine who conducts cognitive neuroscience research and engages in clinical practice; her work began with neurological disorders and diseases such as Alzheimer's dementia, cerebrovascular dementia, multiple sclerosis, head injury, and other diseases and disorders that led to a particular interest in environmental risks for brain injury. With funding from the National Institutes of Health and other agencies, her research evolved into a programmatic focus on neuro-oncology and the effects on the brain from therapeutic irradiation. She has published longitudinal findings on the cognitive and neuroimaging outcomes associated with neural responses to radiotherapy, and discerned them from brain tumor effects. Her work identified the special vulnerability of specific memory systems to injury from radiotherapy, and differentiated them from attention, working memory, and executive functions. Current radiotherapy techniques now protect the hippocampus to the greatest degree possible as part of radiotherapy plans. The pediatric response to therapeutic irradiation shows a different temporal course of post-treatment change in cognition, suggesting a different hippocampal response than that found in adults, and showing that cognition might be a biomarker of radiation effects. The cerebellum is frequently part of the treatment fields for children, and should also be protected as both the hippocampus and cerebellum share the neural mechanisms that make them vulnerable to irradiation.



Dr. Armstrong's long-term interests are the study of memory, attention, and emotion, as well as the cognitive processes affected by white matter disease or injury, and normal effects on white matter as we age. Investigations have focused on resource-limited memory and attention processes, and on the structural distribution of the white matter measure in normal and