////////////You're the Result of Yourself
Pablo Neruda
Don't blame anyone, never complain of anyone or anything
Because basically you have made of your life what you wanted.
Accept the difficulties of edifying yourself
And the worth of starting to correct your character.
/////////////////////
A stroke of genius
BILL NICHOLAS
19/09/2008 4:31:00 PM
Your brain – 700g of grey matter and just one per cent of your body weight – uses 20 per cent of the oxygen you breathe.
The brain is the last big frontier for medicine. It’s scary how little even brain surgeons know about it as anyone present after a brain operation can attest. Can you move your toes? What month is it? Touch your elbow – to see if any “deficits” have turned up.
The new thinking in neuroscience is “plasticity” – that the brain is more like a plant than a machine, that you can cut out diseased bits and it somehow maintains function by working around it.
Stroke is the second biggest killer behind heart disease. While the country’s 300 murders get all the publicity, the 60,000 stroke victims are struck down quietly and strokes are the biggest cause of disability. It hits mostly the over 55s with just 20 per cent of victims younger than that. It costs about $2.4 billion to help manage stroke survivors.
Although there have been significant advances in understanding brain function and brain diseases, little of this has translated into effective drugs for treating brain injury and diseases such as stroke.
Stroke is caused by a blood clot which cuts off the flow of blood into parts of the brain – there are no drugs and not a lot doctors can do about it.
Brain cells cut off from a healthy blood flow will quickly die and doctors have only about three hours to restore the circulation to prevent the damage that occurs. After this initial treatment, there are no drugs that can minimise the resulting brain damage or promote the repair of injured cells.
It is possible via intense training and rehabilitation to restore some lost functions so that neighbouring brain cells can pick up the work of the dead ones.
Restraining a good arm and getting the dud one to work again seems to be yielding good results, but for many, stroke leaves them with lifelong disabilities.
“Even though the brain has some capacity to revitalise itself, new approaches are needed to develop treatments that minimise the damage or prevent it from developing,” says Dr Håkan Muyderman, a Flinders Medical Centre researcher working on potential stroke treatments in the Centre for Neuroscience.
Unlike a heart which basically consists of one major cell type, the brain is a collection of billions of at least five completely different sorts of cells, all of which respond to injury in different ways.
Dr Muyderman is developing methods to deliver treatments to different types of brain cells, an approach that has not been possible before now.
“We are doing this by delivering a genetic treatment directly into selected cells to either repair or alter their function so they are no longer damaging to the brain,” Dr Muyderman says.
He outlined his research to a group of potential benefactors at one of the Inspirational Luncheons at SKYCITY Adelaide this week.
Such drug delivery technology would have endless applications – and not only to the 60,000 Australians hit by stroke every year, Dr Muyderman says.
If anybody would care to make a useful contribution to stroke treatment, Dr Muyderman’s group could use a well-qualified chemist ($100k) and some seed capital to finance the work of coming up with a product that could demonstrate the potential of the work so far.
Shortly after moving from Sweden to Australia and Flinders, Dr Muyderman received one of two highly-competitive and sought-after Mary Overton Neuroscience Fellowships. Not only has Flinders attracted his valuable expertise, but his wife recently took a teaching assignment at an Aboriginal settlement north of Ceduna.
Dr Muyderman’s talk was the last in this year’s series arranged by the Flinders Medical Centre Foundation, chaired by stockbroker Allan Young.
Print
Increase Text Size
Decrease Text Size
No comments:
Post a Comment