Deans' stroke musings: Excitotoxicity and Axon Degeneration

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, June 19, 2014

Excitotoxicity and Axon Degeneration

As one of the 6 causes of the neuronal cascade of death
your doctor should be using this to help your recovery in the first week. But I'd be willing to bet a hell of a lot of money that s/he is doing absolutely nothing to stop the neuronal cascade of death.
Ask your doctor how many neurons are dying in the first week. My calculations for me are here:

How many neurons is your doctor responsible for killing/not saving?

http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4614-5836-4_145

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Abstract

Excitotoxicity has been implicated as a key pathogenic pathway in a number of neurodegenerative diseases and conditions including Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, multiple sclerosis, brain trauma, and stroke. While acute excitotoxicity can result in the initiation of cell death pathways, chronic or low levels of excitotoxin exposure may result in a more slowly progressing pathological cascade. In this respect, there is emerging evidence that excitotoxicity can result in axonal degeneration and pathology, a key pathological feature of many of these neurodegenerative conditions. Recent evidence supports the notion that axon degeneration can be a separate and independent process from cell death, and thus mechanisms involved need to be understood in order to provide axonal protection in neurological disease. While axon degeneration following transection (Wallerian degeneration) has been well documented, less is known about axon degeneration following other insults such as excitotoxicity and the mechanistic relationships they bear to Wallerian degeneration. In particular, how a primarily somatodendritic insult, such as excitotoxicity, results in a pathological cascade within the axon is unclear. This chapter reviews our current understanding of the pathological changes and mechanisms of excitotoxin-induced axon degeneration with particular reference to our understanding of other forms of axonal degeneration and potential mechanisms involved. An increased understanding of the mechanisms of axon degeneration in neurological disease is essential to the development of therapeutic agents targeting axon protection.