The Ultimate Running Machine
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-ultimate-running-machine
After a brutal mugging left him with traumatic brain injury, John Pierre decided to ‘suit up’ in a neon cape and lightning bolt socks, emerging as the New York running community’s very own superhero.
How Woodpeckers Will Save Football - Issue 39: Sport
▻http://nautil.us/issue/39/sport/how-woodpeckers-will-save-football
In 2007, David Smith, a doctor of internal medicine and founder of a company that makes wound dressings, gave a presentation at a medical conference in Maryland. Afterward an audience member, worried by mounting reports of traumatic brain injury from blasts among American soldiers, mentioned, of all things, woodpeckers. If someone could figure out how woodpeckers do it—they slam their beaks into trees thousands of times per day, generating forces far beyond what most people experience in car wrecks—then maybe we could better protect soldiers. The question sent Smith’s own head spinning. “I knew instantaneously that this was something woefully overlooked,” Smith said. Nature was full of animals that routinely generated massive forces on their brains without apparent damage. They included (...)
Stanford researchers ‘stunned’ by stem cell experiment that helped stroke patient walk
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/06/02/stanford-researchers-stunned-by-stem-cell-experiment-that-helped-str
Des #cellules_souches de la moelle osseuse dont le mode d’action ne se fait pas via leur transformation en tissu nerveux.
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. [...]
The one-time therapy involved surgeons drilling a hole into the study participants’ skulls and injecting stem cells in several locations around the area damaged by the stroke. These stem cells were harvested from the bone marrow of adult donors. While the procedure sounds dramatic, it is considered relatively simple as far as brain surgery goes. The patients were conscious the whole time and went home the same day.
[...]
“Their recovery was not just a minimal recovery like someone who couldn’t move a thumb now being able to wiggle it. It was much more meaningful. One 71-year-old wheelchair-bound patient was walking again,” said [Gary] Steinberg [the study’s lead author and chair of neurosurgery at Stanford] who personally performed most of the surgeries.
[...]
Steinberg said that the study does not support the idea that the injected stem cells become neurons, as has been previously thought. Instead, it suggests that they seem to trigger some kind of biochemical process that enhances the brain’s ability to repair itself.
“A theory is that they turn the adult brain into the neonatal brain that recovers well,” he explained.
[...]
Nicholas Boulis, a neurosurgeon and researcher at Emory University, said the study appears to support the idea that there may be latent pathways in the brain that can be reactivated — a theory that has been “working its way to the surface” over the past few years.
#AVC
Dead could be brought ’back to life’ in groundbreaking project
▻http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/05/03/dead-could-be-brought-back-to-life-in-groundbreaking-project
A groundbreaking trial to see if it is possible to regenerate the brains of dead people, has won approval from health watchdogs.
A biotech company [#Bioquark] in the US has been granted ethical permission to recruit 20 patients who have been declared clinically dead from a traumatic brain injury, to test whether parts of their central nervous system can be brought back to life.
Scientists will use a combination of therapies, which include injecting the brain with stem cells and a cocktail of peptides, as well as deploying lasers and nerve stimulation techniques which have been shown to bring patients out of comas.
The trial participants will have been certified dead and only kept alive through life support. They will be monitored for several months using brain imaging equipment to look for signs of regeneration, particularly in the upper spinal cord - the lowest region of the brain stem which controls independent breathing and heartbeat.
The team believes that the brain stem cells may be able to erase their history and re-start life again, based on their surrounding tissue – a process seen in the animal kingdom in creatures like salamanders who can regrow entire limbs.
… oui, je me suis posé la question du mode de recueil de leur #consentement_éclairé indispensable à tout #essai_clinique
Mass. General researchers to build next generation of brain implants - Health & wellness - The Boston Globe
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/health-wellness/2014/05/26/mass-general-researchers-build-next-generation-brain-implants/A3uGYuNJkRYPN1sECgJERM/story.html
Boston researchers will build a generation of brain implants under an ambitious Defense Department program aimed at pioneering more precise ways to treat mental illnesses suffered by combat veterans, including post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, and depression.
The $30 million, five-year project being announced Tuesday is one of the first pieces of President Obama’s BRAIN initiative, unveiled last year in an attempt to foster a revolution in neuroscience similar to the one that occurred when the human genome was sequenced a little more than a decade ago. A second team at the University of California San Francisco will receive $26 million, also for work on brain implants.
The research is inspired by a technology already used in tens of thousands of patients: deep brain stimulators that trigger electrical impulses in part of the brain to quell tremors in Parkinson’s disease. But unlike those simple technologies, the new implants will be responsive, including a network of sensors that can read what is happening in the brain and stimulate multiple brain areas if abnormal activity is detected.
Un grand classique : comme il n’y a pas de fric pour s’occuper des anciens combattants (conditions d’accueil désastreuses, délais d’attente hallucinant pour les consultations, scandales répétés,…) on va trouver une solution technique en leur implantant des électrodes dans le cerveau.
Ça, c’est de la recherche pas de (erk !) l’aide sociale, on peut financer.
