José Paulo Andrade: The Anatomy of a Researcher Who is Also a Photographer

He is known as a professor of Anatomy and as a prolific researcher at CINTESIS – Center for Health Technology and Services Research / Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto, but also as a photographer with vast artistic work. We dissected the life of José Paulo Andrade and left a written portrait.

José Paulo Andrade was born in 1962, in Guimarães. There he grew up and studied until completing the old Lyceum. He wanted to be a doctor, just like his father, who died when he was just six years old. The precocity of this loss did not fail to influence his whole life. He was accepted to study Medicine at FMUP and was in the 5th year of his degree when he started teaching, as a monitor. He graduated in 1986. He worked as a professor and as an intern doctor in Clinical Pathology. At the academic level, he took the Pedagogical Aptitude and Scientific Ability Test, and later, he completed his Doctorate degree and obtained his Aggregation. He dedicates himself entirely to research and teaching and is currently an Associate Professor at FMUP.

He joined CINTESIS at the invitation of its founder and coordinator, Altamiro da Costa Pereira. With him, several researchers from the former Center for Experimental Morphology also joined CINTESIS. Some of them are Dulce Madeira and Armando Cardoso, former and current principal investigators of the group  NeuroGen – Neuronal Degeneration & Regeneration.

Nutrition has always been one of the main themes of his research. Over the decades, he has conducted multiple studies in this area, namely on protein malnutrition, caloric restriction, the role of antioxidants in health, or the effect of food from foods rich in fat, sugar, and calories in learning and neurogenesis.

He can be involved in the laboratory and then in front of the computer reviewing the literature of some topic. He believes that the two types of work are complementary and are part of the research process. During the pandemic, however, he confesses that “the work in the laboratory has been very difficult”.

He confesses to fearing the direct and precipitous extrapolations of work on animal models and in the laboratory for humans. He reinforces, however, that these studies provide “essential clues” for the advancement of knowledge and science.

One of his best-known works is from his works that showed that catechins, present in green tea, help protect the brain from age-related neurodegeneration.

“The truth is that there are studies that indicate that people who drink green tea have fewer diseases like myocardial infarction and strokes and can even live longer,” he observes.

Recently, José Paulo Andrade studied the influence of nutrition and lifestyles on age-related macular degeneration, a disease that is the leading cause of blindness in Western countries, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

In the study “Nutritional and Lifestyle Interventions for Age-Related Macular Degeneration: A Review”, published in Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longetivity, the scientist concluded that these patients should be advised to increase the consumption of vegetables and fatty fish, typical foods of the Mediterranean Diet, and moderate and advanced cases should benefit from taking supplements in vitamins, beta-carotene, and zinc.

As for the “snack bar” diet, the article “Cafeteria-diet effects on cognitive functions, anxiety, fear response and neurogenesis in the juvenile rat” – published in Neurobiology of Learning and Memory– highlights the negative effect of consuming high-calorie foods on learning and memory and on the neurogenesis in the hippocampus in rats.

Among his many articles -his work has been cited more than 1500 (Scopus data)- there is a review on neurogenesis in the formation of the hippocampus in adult humans (“Adult Hippocampal Neurogenesis: Regulation and Possible Functional and Clinical Correlates”), published in Frontiers in Neuroanatomy in 2018. In this work, which quickly became one of the journal’s most read, downloaded, and shared online, José Paulo Andrade exposes the doubts that remain in the literature regarding the very existence of neurogenesis in adult men and its extension, with groups that present positive results and other groups that are much more skeptical.

In addition to these works, others are added, based on the dissection of anatomical parts of the central nervous system by a method called “Klingler”, with application in neurosurgical practice and medical teaching. The results were published in the Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery” and in Annals of Anatomy.

“Virtually nobody does that. The brain dissection had a huge advance in the 20th century, it was abandoned due to imaging and is now being resumed. There is a lot that you can’t see in the image. The use of cadavers also remains extremely important, I would even say obligatory, in the teaching of medicine.

Electronic media are very beautiful, but you have to catch, see and manipulate them to get to know them”, he says.

In all areas in which he multiplies, he reveals that he continues to learn, every day. And the human body continues to fascinate him. “The most amazing thing is that the human body is never like books. We are always discovering new things”, he says.

Another great passion of his life is photography. At CINTESIS and FMUP, everyone knows him through the photos and photographic projects he exhibits and shares on websites with his signature and on social networks. He has done individual and group exhibitions, the most recent of which can be visited until December 12, at the PB27 Gallery, in Porto. The theme, this time, is quite different. Always very dedicated to capturing natural and urban landscapes, in color or in black and white, he now flings himself into the world of (self)perceptions and illusions with a series of provocations on the border between science and art. It is the seeing is believing exposition.

1-Year Ambition

I want to finish some work and continue with laboratory studies. I hope to resume the laboratory work soon.

10-Year Ambition

I can’t imagine what it will be like 10 years from now. Nobody would have said, three years ago, that there would be this current situation due to this virus. There is great unpredictability. What was safe and certain was not.

Life Beyond Teaching and Research

Photography has been a hobby since I was a teenager. In the past, I always used to spend a lot of photo films [laughs]. From the digital, it is clear that there has been a qualitative leap. I mainly photograph urban and natural landscapes. I travel a lot with the only goal of photographing. I remember particularly the trips I made to Iceland and the Dolomites (in Italy). This year, I went to the Azores. I currently have an exhibition resulting from my Master in Artistic Photography at the Instituto de Produção Cultural e Imagem (IPCI). It is different from all the others because I wanted to mix science and art. Will the red color I see be the same red color the other see? Is what we see really the reality or a production of our brain?