The State of the NIH BRAIN Initiative

Quiz your doctor on how this BRAIN initiative will help get all stroke survivors 100% recovered. If they aren't thinking about that, they need to be fired because they are just dead wood sitting around waiting for rot to set in. The status quo in stroke is a complete failure.

1. Only 10% of patients get to full recovery.
2. tPA only fully works to reverse the stroke 12% of the time. Known since 1996.
3. No protocols to prevent your 33% dementia chance post-stroke from an Australian study.
4. Nothing to alleviate your fatigue.
5. Nothing that will cure your spasticity.
6. Nothing on cognitive training unless you find this yourself.
7. No published stroke protocols.
8. No way to compare your stroke hospital results vs. other stroke hospitals.

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2018/06/19/JNEUROSCI.3174-17.2018

Walter Koroshetz, Joshua Gordon, Amy Adams, Andrea Beckel-Mitchener, James Churchill, Gregory Farber, Michelle Freund, Jim Gnadt, Nina Hsu, Nicholas Langhals, Sarah Lisanby, Guoying Liu, Grace Peng, Khara Ramos, Michael Steinmetz, Edmund Talley and Samantha White

Journal of Neuroscience 19 June 2018, 3174-17; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3174-17.2018

• Article
• Info & Metrics
• eLetters
• PDF

Abstract

The BRAIN Initiative® arose from a grand challenge to “accelerate the development and application of new technologies that will enable researchers to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how individual brain cells and complex neural circuits interact at the speed of thought.” The BRAIN Initiative is a public-private effort focused on the development and use of powerful tools for acquiring fundamental insights about how information processing occurs in the central nervous system. As the Initiative enters its fifth year, NIH has supported over 500 principal investigators, who have answered the Initiative's challenge via hundreds of publications describing novel tools, methods, and discoveries that address the Initiative's seven scientific priorities. We describe scientific advances produced by individual labs, multi-investigator teams, and entire consortia that, over the coming decades, will produce more comprehensive and dynamic maps of the brain, deepen our understanding of how circuit activity can produce a rich tapestry of behaviors, and lay the foundation for understanding how its circuitry is disrupted in brain disorders. Much more work remains to bring this vision to fruition, and NIH continues to look to the diverse scientific community, from mathematics, to physics, chemistry, engineering, neuroethics, and neuroscience, to ensure that the greatest scientific benefit arises from this unique research Initiative.