Almost two years old and I bet nothing here got further than this writeup. I bet there was no 'buzz' in your stroke hospital because they never heard of this. So this was a white matter stroke and all that was needed was sending axons and dendrites around the damaged area. Much, much easier than trying to recreate function from a dead area. Doesn't anyone critically look at research and put it into understandable terms? Can't help me at all, I have way too much dead gray matter.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/06/02/stanford-researchers-stunned-by-stem-cell-experiment-that-helped-stroke-patient-walk/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f0b59f738ba6
Stanford
researchers studying the effect of stem cells injected directly into
the brains of stroke patients said Thursday that they were "stunned" by
the extent to which the experimental treatment restored motor function
in some of the patients. While the research involved only 18 patients
and was designed primarily to look at the safety of such a procedure and
not its effectiveness, it is creating significant buzz in the
neuroscience community because the results appear to contradict a
core belief about brain damage — that it is permanent and irreversible.
The results, published in the journal
Stroke, could
have implications for our understanding of an array of disorders
including traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury and Alzheimer's if
confirmed in larger-scale testing.
The work involved patients who
had passed the critical six-month mark when recoveries generally
plateau and there are rarely further improvements. This is the point at
which therapies are typically stopped as brain circuits are thought to
be dead and unable to be repaired. Each participant in the study had
suffered a stroke beneath the brain’s outermost layer and had
significant impairments in moving their arms and-or legs. Some
participants in the study had had a stroke as long as three to five
years before the experimental treatment.
This is such old news!
ReplyDeleteThe same story about Phase 1 trial with only 18 people. I am in the Phase 2 trial with 156 people and do not expect results until 2019.
Lazy reporters