Deans' stroke musings: Discovery paves way for treatments to prevent brain damage or death following head trauma

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, April 23, 2015

Discovery paves way for treatments to prevent brain damage or death following head trauma

If we had any competency whatsoever in the stroke associations this would be put at the top of the strategy list to solve. But we have crap so don't expect this to become useful to survivors for 50 years. If you want it sooner YOU will need to start screaming at every stroke medical person you see.
Scientists pinpoint brain-swelling mechanism
team of UBC researchers has made a significant discovery uncovering the cause of brain swelling after trauma to the head. Their research, published today in Cell, paves the way for a preventative drug treatment for severe brain damage following stroke, infection, head injury or cardiac arrest.
By turning off a single gene, scientists from the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health (DMCBH), a partnership of UBC and Vancouver Coastal Health, were able to successfully stop swelling in rodent brains.
Brain swelling is a gradual process that becomes life-threatening within days of the injury, and is caused by sodium chloride drawing water into the nerve cells. This swelling—known as cytotoxic edema—eventually kills brain cells.

Brian MacVicar

“We’ve known for years that sodium chloride accumulation in neurons is responsible for brain swelling, but now we know how it’s getting into cells, and we have a target to stop it,” explains brain researcher Brian MacVicar, co-director of DMCBH with the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute and the study’s principal investigator.
The team, including Terrance Snutch, director of translational neuroscience at the DMCBH, developed several novel technological approaches to identify the cascade of events that took place within individual brain cells as they swelled.
They then switched off the expression of different genes and were able to pinpoint a single protein—SLC26A11—that acts as a channel for chloride to enter nerve cells. By turning off the chloride channel, the accumulation of fluid into the cells was halted, and nerve cells no longer died.
“It was quite a surprising result, because we had few indications as to what this protein did in the brain,” says Ravi Rungta, then a graduate student in the MacVicar lab and the paper’s lead author.
Though the technique used by the researchers to block swelling and cell death is unlikely to work quickly enough to mitigate swelling in the case of real head trauma, the discovery has provided a target for drug development.
“This discovery is significant because it gives us a specific target – now that we know what we’re shooting at, we just need the ammunition,” says MacVicar. “That’s what we’re doing now: looking for drugs to inhibit the chloride channel.”
BACKGROUND
This research was co-sponsored by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Brain Canada, Genome British Columbia, the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, and the Koerner Foundation.
About brain swelling:
Severe brain swelling is life threatening because the skull, which normally protects the brain, also limits its ability to expand. With increasing pressure and nowhere to go, the brain centres that control breathing can be crushed.
At present, treatment options are limited. When all other treatment options fail, an operation called a decompressive craniectomy is sometimes performed, in which a portion of the skull is removed and the brain is allowed to swell out of the skull. Although extreme, it can save the patient’s life, but the procedure is not always effective nor without complications. There is an urgent need for new treatments.
Some well-known figures whose lives were claimed by brain injuries include actress Natasha Richardson (wife of actor Liam Neeson), who died in 2009 after a skiing accident and Dr. Richard Atkins, creator of the Atkins diet, who died in 2003 after slipping on ice.