Posts tagged brain injury
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
New biomaterials promote neuroregeneration after a brain injury
Professor José Miguel Soria, a member of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Universidad CEU Cardenal Herrera, has co-directed with Professor Manuel Monleón of the Universitat Politècnica de València a study on the compatibility of polymeric biomaterials in the brain and its effectiveness to favour neuroregeneration in areas with some kind of damage or brain injury.
The research carried out has shown that these types of implants, made of a biocompatible synthetic material, are colonized within two months by neural progenitor cells and irrigated by new blood vessels. This allows the generation, within these structures, of new neurons and glia, capable of repairing injured brain tissue caused by trauma, stroke or neurodegenerative disease, among other causes.
The synthetic structures used in this study are made with a porous and biocompatible polymeric material called acrylate copolymer. In the first phase of the project, the structures have been studied in vitro by implanting them into neural tissue, and subsequently also in vivo, when implanted in two areas of the adult rat brain: the cerebral cortex and the subventricular zone, the most important source of generation of adult neural stem cells.
The study has confirmed the high biocompatibility of polymeric materials, such as acrylate copolymer, with brain tissue and opens new possibilities of the effectiveness of the implementation of these structures in the brain, seeking optimum location for developing regenerative strategies of the central nervous system.
Furthermore, the results are particularly relevant when one considers that in the adult brain neuroregeneration capacity is more limited than in younger individuals and that the main impediment for this is the lack of revascularization of damaged tissue, something that the biomaterial studied has shown to favour.
(Source: alphagalileo.org)
Researchers Find Evidence That Brain Compensates After Traumatic Injury
Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Montefiore Medical Center have found that a special magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique may be able to predict which patients who have experienced concussions will improve. The results, which were presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), suggest that, in some patients, the brain may change to compensate for the damage caused by the injury.
“This finding could lead to strategies for preventing and repairing the damage that accompanies traumatic brain injury,” said Michael Lipton, M.D., Ph.D., who led the study and is associate director of the Gruss Magnetic Resonance Research Center at Einstein and medical director of MRI services at Montefiore, the University Hospital and academic medical center for Einstein.
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“In a traumatic brain injury, it’s not one specific area that is affected but multiple areas of the brain which are interconnected by axons,” said Dr. Lipton, who is also associate professor of radiology, of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and in the Dominick P. Purpura Department of Neuroscience at Einstein. “Abnormally low FA within white matter has been correlated with cognitive impairment in concussion patients. We believe that high FA is evidence not of axonal injury, but of brain changes that are occurring in response to the trauma.”
Virtual Reality Could Spot Real-World Impairments
A virtual reality test being developed at UTSC might do a better job than pencil-and-paper tests of predicting whether a cognitive impairment will have real-world consequences.
The test developed by Konstantine Zakzanis, associate professor of psychology, and colleagues, uses a computer-game-like virtual world and asks volunteers to navigate their ways through tasks such as delivering packages or running errands around town.
“If we’re being asked to tell if people could do things like work, houseclean, and take care of their kids, we need to show that our tests predict performance in the real world,” says Zakzanis.
But standard tests don’t do that very well, he says. Although tests that ask people to do things like solve math problems, sort cards, remember names, or judge the relative positions of lines in visual two dimensional space, can detect cognitive impairments caused by circumscribed lesions following a stroke or head injury, they’re not very good at predicting who will be able to function in the real world and who won’t.
That’s a problem for cognitively impaired people who might be denied insurance benefits or workers compensation based on tests that are insensitive to demonstrating their impairment. It is akin to having a broken arm with no x-ray to prove it.
Reconsidering cancer’s bad guy
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have found that a protein, known for causing cancer cells to spread around the body, is also one of the molecules that trigger repair processes in the brain. These findings are the subject of a paper, published this week in Nature Communications. They point the way to new avenues of research into degenerative brain diseases like Alzheimer’s.
How to repair brain injuries is a fundamental question facing brain researchers. Scientists have been familiar with the protein S100A4 for some time as a factor in metastasis, or how cancer spreads. However it’s the first time the protein has been shown to play a role in brain protection and repair.
“This protein is not normally in the brain, only when there’s trauma or degeneration. When we deleted the protein in mice we discovered that their brains were less protected and able to resist injury. We also discovered that S100A4 works by activating signalling pathways inside neurons,” says Postdoc Oksana Dmytriyeva, who worked on the research in a team at the Protein Laboratory in the Department of Neuroscience and Pharmacology at the University of Copenhagen.
The villain turns out to be the hero
This research stands on the shoulders of many years of work on S100A4 in its deadlier role in cancer progression. The discovery represents a significant development for the new Neuro-Oncology Group that moved to the University of Copenhagen’s Protein Laboratory Group from the Danish Cancer Society in October.
“We were surprised to find this protein in this role, as we thought it was purely a cancer protein. We are very excited about it and we’re looking forward to continuing our research in a practical direction. We hope that the findings will eventually benefit people who need treatment for neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, although obviously we have a long way to go before we get to that point,” says Oksana Dmytriyeva.
(Source: news.ku.dk)
Self-Imagination Can Enhance Memory in Healthy and Memory-Impaired Individuals
There’s no question that our ability to remember informs our sense of self. Now research published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, provides new evidence that the relationship may also work the other way around: Invoking our sense of self can influence what we are able to remember.
Research has shown that self-imagination – imagining something from a personal perspective – can be an effective strategy for helping us to recognize something we’ve seen before or retrieve specific information on cue. And these beneficial effects have been demonstrated for both healthy adults and for individuals who suffer memory impairments as a result of brain injury.
These findings suggest that self-imagination is a promising strategy for memory rehabilitation. But no study has investigated the effect of self-imagination on what is perhaps the most difficult, and most relevant, type of memory: free recall.
Western neuroscientists breakthrough on physical cause of vegetative state
By exploring parts of the brain that trigger during periods of daydreaming and mind-wandering, neuroscientists from Western University have made a significant breakthrough in understanding what physically happens in the brain to cause vegetative state and other so-called “disorders of consciousness.”
Vegetative state and related disorders such as the minimally conscious state are amongst the least understood conditions in modern medicine because there is no particular type of brain damage that is known to cause them. This lack of knowledge leads to an alarmingly high level of misdiagnosis.
In support of the study titled, “A role for the default mode network in the bases of disorders of consciousness,” Davinia Fernandez-Espejo, a post doctoral fellow at Western’s Brain and Mind Institute, utilized a technique called diffusion tensor imaging tractography to investigate more than 50 patients suffering from varying degrees of brain injury.
This state-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique allows researchers to virtually reconstruct the pathways that connect different parts of the brain in the patients while detecting subtle differences in their brain damage.
Specifically, Fernandez-Espejo was able to show that in vegetative state patients, a group of brain regions known as the default mode network that are known to activate during periods of daydreaming and mind-wandering were significantly disconnected, relative to healthy individuals.
"These findings are a first step towards identifying biomarkers that will help us to improve diagnosis and to find possible therapies for these patients" says Fernandez-Espejo. "But they also give us new information about how the healthy brain generates consciousness."
(Source: communications.uwo.ca)
Battling back from a brain injury
Much of the recent attention on traumatic brain injury has focused on the increased risk of neurodegenerative diseases doctors think recurrent injuries may lead to. But transportation accidents and falls, particularly among the elderly, are leading causes of TBI, and one serious head injury can be devastating. Karl Weisgraber is a retired biochemist who worked on cardiovascular and Alzheimer’s research at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco. In October of last year, he was on a ladder doing work on the side of his house when he fell and smacked his head on a rock, suffering a severe traumatic brain injury. The 71-year-old Walnut Creek man spent three weeks in a coma and, through therapy, had to relearn how to walk, read and write. He is greatly appreciative of the staffs at San Francisco General and California Pacific Medical Center who worked with him, and of his wife, Judi.
A child who suffers a moderate or severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) may still have substantial functional disabilities and reduced quality of life 2 years after the injury. After those first 2 years, further improvement may be minimal. Better interventions are needed to prevent long-lasting consequences of TBI in children conclude the authors of a study published in Journal of Neurotrauma, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers.
Frederick Rivara and colleagues from University of Washington, Seattle, and Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital, Tacoma, WA, and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, describe the functional and quality of life outcomes of children who experienced a moderate or severe TBI when they were 0-17 years of age. In the article “Persistence of Disability 24 to 36 Months after Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury: A Cohort Study” they follow up on a previous report that found improvement in some areas of functioning for up to 24 months. In this expanded study, the authors showed no significant improvement in the children’s ability to function, participate in activities, or in their quality of life between 24 and 36 months post-injury, and they suggest that a plateau is reached in the recovery.
"This important communication by Rivara and colleagues reinforces the concept that pediatric traumatic brain injury is associated with significant enduring morbidity, with recovery plateauing over time," says John T. Povlishock, PhD, Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Neurotrauma and Professor, VCU Neuroscience Center, Medical College of Virginia, Richmond. “This finding also reinforces emerging thought that pediatric traumatic brain injury must be viewed in another context, rather than the current perception that the course of such injury parallels that found in the adult population.”
Researchers have taken a key step towards recovering specific brain functions in sufferers of brain disease and injuries by successfully restoring the decision-making processes in monkeys.
By placing a neural device onto the front part of the monkeys’ brains, the researchers, from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre, University of Kentucky and University of Southern California, were able to recover, and even improve, the monkeys’ ability to make decisions when their normal cognitive functioning was disrupted.
The study, which has been published today (Sept. 14) in IOP Publishing’s Journal of Neural Engineering, involved the use of a neural prosthesis, which consisted of an array of electrodes measuring the signals from neurons in the brain to calculate how the monkeys’ ability to perform a memory task could be restored.
Robots that can read and respond to brain waves will eventually help stroke patients regain movement, using new neural interfaces that can re-train damaged motor pathways. Neuroscientists have made great strides in brain-machine interfaces that can respond to a person’s thoughts — a new generation will drive a non-invasive robotic orthotic, retraining the patient’s own body.
Patients who have suffered a stroke or other injury can lose the active use of their limbs, rendering them unable to simply think about moving an arm or hand and then do it. Sometimes it’s possible to re-establish the lost connection, with time and repetitive physical therapy. Researchers at Rice University are using a robotic exoskeleton and a neural interface to improve matters.