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.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Cell-saving drugs could reduce brain damage after stroke

I originally wrote about this in Sept. 2011
And if we had a great stroke association a request for proposal would have gone out to stroke researchers the next week, asking for translational research projects that would solve this problem. But instead we have press release organizations. So you as a survivor will not be helped by the time you have your next stroke.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140326153721.htm?
Date:
March 26, 2014
Source:
University College London
Summary:
Long-term brain damage caused by stroke could be reduced by saving cells called pericytes that control blood flow in capillaries, reports a new study. The results show not only that pericytes are the main regulator of blood flow to the brain, but also that they tighten and die around capillaries after stroke. This significantly impairs blood flow in the long term, causing lasting damage to brain cells.
Long-term brain damage caused by stroke could be reduced by saving cells called pericytes that control blood flow in capillaries, reports a new study led by scientists from UCL (University College London).





Until now, many scientists believed that blood flow within the brain was solely controlled by changes in the diameter of arterioles, blood vessels that branch out from arteries into smaller capillaries. The latest research reveals that the brain's blood supply is in fact chiefly controlled by the narrowing or widening of capillaries as pericytes tighten or loosen around them.
The study, published this week in Nature, shows not only that pericytes are the main regulator of blood flow to the brain, but also that they tighten and die around capillaries after stroke. This significantly impairs blood flow in the long term, causing lasting damage to brain cells. The team of scientists from UCL, Oxford University and the University of Copenhagen showed that certain chemicals could halve pericyte death from simulated stroke in the lab, and hope to develop these into drugs to treat stroke victims.
"At present, clinicians can remove clots blocking blood flow to the brain if stroke patients reach hospital early enough," explains Professor David Attwell of UCL's Department of Neuroscience, Physiology & Pharmacology, who led the study. "However, the capillary constriction produced by pericytes may, by restricting the blood supply for a long time, cause further damage to nerve cells even after the clot is removed. Our latest research suggests that devising drugs to prevent capillary constriction may offer new therapies for reducing the disability caused by stroke."
"This discovery offers radically new treatment approaches for stroke," says study co-author Professor Alastair Buchan, Dean of Medicine and Head of the Medical Sciences Division at Oxford University. "Importantly, we should now be able to identify drugs that target these cells. If we are able to prevent pericytes from dying, it should help restore blood flow in the brain to normal and prevent the ongoing slow damage we see after a stroke which causes so much neurological disability in our patients."
The new research also gives insight into the mechanisms underlying the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging to detect blood flow changes in the brain.

"Functional imaging allows us to see the activity of nerve cells within the human brain but until now we didn't quite know what we were looking at," explains Professor Attwell. "We have shown that pericytes initiate the increase in blood flow seen when nerve cells become active, so we now know that functional imaging signals are caused by a pericyte-mediated increase of capillary diameter. Knowing exactly what functional imaging shows will help us to better understand and interpret what we see."

1 comment:

  1. This is an encouraging development. I hope they succeed. It would be an elegantly simple solution.

    ReplyDelete