Ognen Petroff
Ognen A. C. Petroff, associate professor emeritus of neurology, graduated from Yale College (BS with honors in chemistry, 1973) and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (MD, 1977). After internal medicine training at Pennsylvania Hospital (University of Pennsylvania), he took additional neurology house-staff and EEG fellowship training at Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital. Dr. Petroff joined the Yale faculty practice (Yale Medicine) and the attending staff at Yale New Haven Health, serving as consultant in neurology and clinical neurophysiology for over forty years. He served as neurology consultant for Yale faculty, students and staff at Yale Health (Yale HMO) for twenty-four years. Dr. Petroff was appointed medical director of EEG (2005) and program director for ACGME Clinical Neurophysiology fellowship training at Yale New Haven Hospital (2012).
Dr. Petroff was appointed associate research scientist in neurology (1983), assistant professor (1984), associate professor (traditional track 1990), associate professor of neurology with tenure (1994), and professor emeritus of neurology (2023).
His research career focused on translational research developing magnetic resonance spectroscopic neuroimaging (MRI & MRSI) for clinical research on stroke, epilepsy, seizure disorders, and encephalopathies associated with systemic disease processes (delirium). Dr. Petroff helped develop non-invasive neuroimaging methods to measure in vivo cerebral (mitochondrial) metabolism and oxidative-phosphorylation energetics (cerebral phosphocreatine, ATP, intracellular pH), aerobic glycolysis and glycogenolysis (cerebral lactate), neurotransmitter metabolism (glutamate, gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), homocarnosine), ammonia metabolism (glutamine) and axonal-oligodendroglial mitochondrial metabolism (N-acetyl-aspartate).
Mentored by James W. Prichard and Robert G. Shulman, Dr. Petroff helped develop the use of intravenous infused non-radioactive (stable) isotope metabolic tracers (13C-glucose and 13C-acetate) to measure in-vivo brain metabolic rates of patients and control subjects, using magnetic resonance neuroimaging. In collaboration with Dennis D. Spencer, Dr. Petroff characterized the changes in mitochondrial and neurotransmitter metabolism in the epileptogenic hippocampus, by intravenously infusing 13C-glucose or 13C-acetate during surgery for the remission of medically refractory temporal lobe epilepsies.
Dr. Petroff developed an independent translational magnetic resonance neuroimaging research program in collaboration with Richard H. Mattson, Douglas L. Rothman, and Fahmeed Hyder. Pioneering in vivo MRSI methods to measure changes in neurotransmitter metabolism were used to characterize generalized and focal human epilepsies. The impact of new anti-seizure medications on cerebral neurotransmitter metabolism was measured along with changes in patient clinical seizure frequency. Frequent clinical seizures were associated with moderately low GABA cortical levels with significantly decreased homocarnosine. Anti-seizure medications that increased brain homocarnosine levels improved patient seizure control.