alt Hacker NewsUCLA discovers first stroke rehabilitation drug to repair brain damage (2025)
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If you've read Ted Chiang's "Understand," you'll understand why this headline made my eyes pop out. For those who haven't, it's in the "Stories of Your Life and Others" collection, which includes the short story that the film Arrival was based on.
It is this compound https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39106304/
So my question does it work with Alzheimer's.?
My understanding was that psychedelics have proven to be effective at opening up a “critical period” where a brain can rewire itself like when in childhood. Wonder if this is related.
https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/148/6/1862/8052899?gu...
Could this treatment also help with other neurodegenerative diseases?
> “The goal is to have a medicine that stroke patients can take that produces the effects of rehabilitation,” said Dr. S. Thomas Carmichael, the study’s lead author and professor and chair of UCLA Neurology. “Rehabilitation after stroke is limited in its actual effects because most patients cannot sustain the rehab intensity needed for stroke recovery.
Sounds truly amazing, I have known two people who had severe strokes - one's PT was contingent on triaging resources to whoever was likely to recover more, another simply hated PT and speech therapy and often refused to participate or do the exercises. Even if it didn't help recovery a medicine like this would have reduced the stress of everyone involved.
> This type of neuron helps generate a brain rhythm, termed a gamma oscillation, which links neurons together so that they form coordinated networks to produce a behavior, such as movement. Stroke causes the brain to lose gamma oscillations. Successful physical rehabilitation in both laboratory mice and humans brought gamma oscillations back into the brain and, in the mouse model, repaired the lost connections of parvalbumin neurons.
>Carmichael and the team then identified two candidate drugs that might produce gamma oscillations after stroke. These drugs specifically work to excite parvalbumin neurons.
Asking while being total layperson here - can we generate those gamma oscillations by an [may be implanted] electronic device?
Edit: and google search to help, judging by the dates seems to be a pretty fresh field :
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
"... by pairing robotic rehabilitation with a clinical-like noninvasive 40 Hz transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation, we achieved similar motor improvements mediated by the effective restoring of movement-related gamma band power, improvement of PV-IN maladaptive network dynamics, and increased PV-IN connections in premotor cortex. "
It also sounds like getting an exoskeleton for such patients can be helpful not only to perform immediate tasks, it also can be a part of the restoring process.
... in male mice.
I think savvy universities want PIs who are savvy enough to realize that the point of these is to boost measurable visibility like citation count and h-index, so the headline of a news release boosting the article doesn't matter. They can always blame a copy editor for the headlines. It could read "world peace solved with moon juice." The provost would only care if it generated negative feedback. So it's the PR department's job to juice it as much as possible without getting blowback.
How do they test this on mice? Do they trigger brain seizures in them?
Neuralink.
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Are there any supplements that can work for neurogenesis? I've heard Lions Mane extract can do this, but I'm not sure. Anybody know of anything?
My understanding was that strokes caused brain cell death, and that there was no coming back from that, but my neurologists would speak of 'bruised' brain cells, and that after weeks or months or even years you can see recovered function. UCLA's work here is targeting this disconnection and the lost rhythm in the surviving, distant networks. However there is, as yet, NO concievable intervention that could recover function from cell death at that center of the infarct.