Deans' stroke musings: Glial growth factor 2 promotes functional recovery with treatment initiated up to 7 days after permanent focal ischemic stroke

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Glial growth factor 2 promotes functional recovery with treatment initiated up to 7 days after permanent focal ischemic stroke

Hey 7 days after, you'll have to carry this article with you and the GFs into the ER for your next stroke. Start shouting from the rooftops.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028390810001784

Abstract

Neuregulins are a family of growth factors essential for normal cardiac and nervous system development. The EGF-like domain of neuregulins contains the active site which binds and activates signaling cascades through ErbB receptors. A neuregulin-1 gene EGF-like fragment demonstrated neuroprotection in the transient middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) stroke model and drastically reduced infarct volume (Xu et al., 2004). Here we use a permanent MCAO rat model to initially compare two products of the neuregulin-1 gene and also assess levels of recovery with acute versus delayed time to treatment. In the initial study full-length glial growth factor 2 (GGF2) and an EGF-like domain fragment were compared with acute intravenous delivery. In a second study GGF2 only was delivered starting at 24 h, 3 days or 7 days after permanent ischemia was induced. In both studies daily intravenous administration continued for 10 days. Recovery of neurological function was assessed using limb placing and body swing tests. GGF2 had similar functional improvements compared to the EGF-like domain fragment at equimolar doses, and a higher dose of GGF2 demonstrated more robust functional improvements compared to a lower dose. GGF2 improved sensorimotor recovery with all treatment paradigms, even enhancing recovery of function with a delay of 7 days to treatment. Histological assessments did not show any associated reduction in infarct volume at either 48 h or 21 days post-ischemic event. Neurorestorative effects of this kind are of great potential clinical importance, given the difficulty of delivering neuroprotective therapies within a short time after an ischemic event in human patients. If confirmed by additional work including additional data on mechanism(s) of improved outcome with verification in other stroke models, one can make a compelling case to bring GGF2 to clinical trials as a neurorestorative approach to improving outcome following stroke injury.