(Press-News.org) MAYWOOD, Ill. -- A new technique that jumpstarts the growth of nerve fibers could reverse much of the damage caused by strokes, researchers report in the Jan. 7, 2011 issue of the journal Stroke.
"This therapy may be used to restore function even when it's given long after ischemic brain damage has occurred," senior author Gwendolyn Kartje, MD, PhD and colleagues write.
The article has been published online in advance of the print edition of Stroke.
Kartje is director of the Neuroscience Institute of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine and chief of neuroscience research at Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital.
There currently is little doctors can do to limit stroke damage after the first day following a stroke. Most strokes are ischemic (caused by blood clots). A drug called tPA can limit damage, but must be given within the first three hours for the greatest benefit -- and most patients do not receive treatment within that time window.
Kartje and colleagues report on a treatment called anti-Nogo-A therapy. Nogo-A is a protein that inhibits the growth of nerve fibers called axons. It serves as a check on runaway nerve growth that could cause a patient to be overly sensitive to pain, or to experience involuntary movements. (The protein is called Nogo because it in effect says "No go" to axons.) In anti-Nogo therapy, an antibody disables the Nogo protein. This allows the growth of axons into the stroke-affected side of the body and the restoration of functions lost due to stroke.
Kartje and colleagues report dramatic results of anti-Nogo therapy in rats that had experienced medically induced strokes. Researchers trained rats to reach and grab food pellets with their front paws. One week after experiencing a stroke, the animals all had significant deficits in grabbing pellets with their stroke-impaired limbs. There was little improvement over the next eight weeks.
Nine weeks after their stroke, six rats received anti-Nogo therapy, four rats received a control treatment consisting of an inactive antibody and five rats received no treatment. Nine weeks later, rats that had received anti-Nogo therapy regained 78 percent of their pre-stroke ability to grab pellets. By comparison, rats receiving no treatment regained 47 percent of their pre-stroke ability, and rats receiving the control treatment of inactive antibodies regained 33 percent of their pre-stroke performance.
Subsequent examination of brain tissue found that the rats that received anti-Nogo therapy experienced significant sprouting of axons.
Researchers wrote that anti-nogo therapy "can induce remarkable compensatory sprouting and fiber growth, indicating the responsiveness of the chronically injured brain to form new neural networks under the proper growth conditions."
The findings "are of great clinical importance," researchers concluded. Anti-Nogo-A therapy "may benefit not only victims of spinal cord injury or patients in the early stage of stroke recovery, but also patients in later stages who suffer from neurological disability due to brain damage from stroke or other causes."
In a Phase I, multicenter trail at other centers, patients paralyzed by spinal cord injuries are receiving anti-Nogo therapy. The trial is sponsored by the pharmaceutical company Novartis.
INFORMATION:
Kartje's co-authors of the study in Stroke are first author Shih-Yen Tsai, MD, PhD and Catherine Papadopoulos, PhD, of Hines VA Hospital and Martin Schwab, PhD, of the University of Zurich.
The study was funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
END
MAYWOOD, Ill. -- Surgery to remove tumors under the brain known as acoustic neuromas produces favorable outcomes in the "vast majority" of patients, according to one of the largest studies of its kind.
Loyola University Hospital surgeons Dr. Douglas Anderson and Dr. John Leonetti followed 730 patients whom they had jointly operated on during a 21-year period. Patients ranged in age from 9 to 79, with a median age of 48. The average clinical followup was 32 months.
Every patient survived the surgery, and the surgeons were able to completely remove the tumors in 95.1 percent ...
DURHAM, N.C. – The brain's visual neurons continually develop predictions of what they will perceive and then correct erroneous assumptions as they take in additional external information, according to new research done at Duke University.
This new mechanism for visual cognition challenges the currently held model of sight and could change the way neuroscientists study the brain.
The new vision model is called predictive coding. It is more complex and adds an extra dimension to the standard model of sight. The prevailing model has been that neurons process incoming ...
INDIANAPOLIS – A grant from the D. J. Angus-Scientech Educational Foundation has made it possible for a student from a suburban Indianapolis high school to co-author, along with his mentor and two other scientists, a theoretical physics study in a top tier peer-reviewed scientific journal, a paper which has been selected for rapid communication due to its importance to the field.
"It is extremely rare for a high school student to be a co-author on a physics paper. Statistics on this aren't available, but it is likely less than 1 paper in 1,000, that's one tenth of one ...
HOUSTON (Dec. 7, 2010) – Private insurers appear to be more effective in controlling health care spending differences between two Texas cities than Medicare, according to researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) School of Public Health. Researchers found that sharp disparities in per-capita Medicare healthcare spending between McAllen and El Paso were significantly diminished when private insurance paid for health care costs in the under-65 population.
"For a number of reasons, insurers generally are reluctant to intrude on ...
Among patients with a family or past history of colorectal cancer (CRC), testing between colonoscopies helps detect CRC and advanced tumors that are either missed or develop rapidly, according to a new study in Gastroenterology, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute.
"By using fecal immunochemical testing — a new type of stool blood test — in the interval between surveillance colonoscopies, we were able to detect cancer much sooner than if we had waited for the scheduled surveillance," said Graeme P. Young, MD, AGAF, FRACP, ...
Are you ready for robots in the ER?
A group of computer engineers at Vanderbilt University is convinced that the basic technology is now available to create robot assistants that can perform effectively in the often-chaotic environment of the emergency room. The specialists in emergency medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center are enthusiastic about the potential advantages. So, the two groups have formed an interdisciplinary team to explore the use of robotics in this critical and challenging setting.
Team member Mitch Wilkes, associate professor of electrical ...
In these modern times, people can have jobs that weren't traditionally associated with their genders. Men are nurses; women are CEOs. A new study examines perceptions of people in high-powered jobs and finds that they're likely to be judged more harshly for mistakes if they're in a job that's not normally associated with their gender.
"The reason I got interested is, there was so much talk about race and gender barriers being broken," says Victoria Brescoll, a psychological scientist at Yale University and first author of the study. In the 2008 presidential election, ...
Manhattan, KS —December 7, 2010— We've all been there: we are watching a movie with a parent or relative when a steamy love scene appears. A new study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology shows that all of that squirming and averting of eyes is normal, especially when you are accompanied by your parents. The authors of the study assert that not all movie-watching experiences are enjoyable or positive. Some movies make us feel downright uncomfortable or disturbed in their content and delivery, while others are inspirational, touching, or have us rolling on the floor. ...
Questionnaire results and DNA samples volunteered by a group of University of Alberta students has broken new ground in the study of aggression. U of A Psychology researcher Peter Hurd was looking at the link between an individual's sensitivity to testosterone and aggressive behaviour.
"I looked at the gene that makes the body's testosterone detector to determine if variations in this detector's sensitivity to the chemical causes people to be more or less aggressive," said Hurd.
Hurd came across a previously published study in India that found violent criminals had ...
Scientists have created a way to isolate neural stem cells – cells that give rise to all the cell types of the brain – from human brain tissue with unprecedented precision, an important step toward developing new treatments for conditions of the nervous system, like Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases and spinal cord injury.
The work by a team of neuroscientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center was published in the Nov. 3 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. Neurologist Steven Goldman, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Department of Neurology, led the team.
The ...
