Deans' stroke musings: Therapeutic benefit of treatment of stroke with Simvastatin and human umbilical cord blood cells: neurogenesis, synaptic plasticity and axon growth.

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.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Therapeutic benefit of treatment of stroke with Simvastatin and human umbilical cord blood cells: neurogenesis, synaptic plasticity and axon growth.

So I wonder if statin use alone would be helpful since the rest of it seems like it will take forever to prove in humans.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22405262

Abstract

The therapeutic efficacy of cell-based therapy after stroke can be enhanced by making the host brain tissue more receptive to the administered cells which thereby facilitates brain plasticity. We hypothesized that Simvastatin increases human umbilical cord blood cell (HUCBC) migration into the ischemic brain and promotes brain plasticity and neurological functional outcome after stroke. Rats were subjected to 2 hour middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAo) and administered sub-therapeutic doses of Simvastatin (0.5 mg/kg, gavaged daily for 7 days), HUCBCs (1×10⁶, one time injection via tail vein) or combination Simvastatin with HUCBCs starting at 24 hours after stroke. Combination treatment of stroke showed an interactive effect in improvement of neurological outcome compared with Simvastatin- or HUCBC-monotherapy groups. In addition, combination treatment significantly increased brain-derived neurotrophic factor/TrkB expression and the number of engrafted-HUCBCs in the ischemic brain compared with HUCBC-monotherapy. The number of engrafted-HUCBCs were significantly correlated with functional outcome (modified neurological severity score). Combination treatment significantly increased neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity in the ischemic brain, and promoted neuroblast migration in cultured subventricular zone explants. Using primary cultured neurons (PCNs), we found that combination treatment enhanced neurite outgrowth compared with non-treatment control, Simvastatin- or HUCBC-supernatant monotherapy. Inhibition of TrkB significantly attenuated combination treatment induced neurite outgrowth. Our data indicate that combination Simvastatin and HUCBC treatment of stroke increases BDNF/TrkB expression, enhances HUCBC migration into the ischemic brain, amplifies endogenous neurogenesis, synaptic plasticity and axonal growth, and thereby improves functional outcome after stroke.