Strokes: Therapy, Drugs, & more

 
Restorative Neurology “Drugs and Recovery Following Stroke”

This past week I have dedicated most of my time to an article I found that's main focus was the recovery process of a stroke. The main topic for this journal dealt with four main points, the biological and environmental factors of a stroke, the responses to the injury, neuronal rearrangements, and the adaptive responses.

Thanks to laboratory work, these four factors can now be understood and also provide information on the recovery process for a brain injury such as the stroke.  The way these researches went about their experiment involved four different procedures. Investigations were done for the biological and environmental factors, this was more of an observational study which involves a simple task such as book keeping, and keeping an open eye for changes that stood out. Some of these details that  were compared to each other were for example the size of the specific injury, the location, the rate this injury occurred at and how fast these injuries took to recover. For the responses to injury section and the adaptive responses experiments were done on animals to compare the variety of responses the brain had to different scenarios. Cerebral edema is an example of the most common response, which is the excess accumulation of water in the intra/extra spaces in the brain. These responses were also compared in different areas, how fast they took to respond, how beneficial these responses were, and how they react to a variety of drugs. Taking to note that out of all the drugs that were used the two that are normally prescribed now on humans, actually were the ones that slowed the recovery process even more, these two were phenytoin and benzodiazepines. The third section also involved rats mostly adult rats. The neuronal rearrangements dealt with the new connections our neurons and axons make after an injury occurs and the connections that are lost. Some of these connections appear to happen 8 hours after an injury which would be beneficial if these connections would help, but they seem to impede the recovery process. In the other hand the connections that would be beneficial are of course the ones that take months to happen.

There are many drugs out there at this very moment that seem to aid the injury, however none stand out from the rest. As a person interest in neurology and someone who had her grandpa suffer such an injury I actually found this article very interesting, and even if you don't think this would interest you try and learn a little about it.  I believe we all can agree the brain is the reason we function making it very important, but yet we still do not understand how it truly works.

Here is the link if you are interested in reading more.
http://stroke.ahajournals.org/content/21/11/1636.short

Citation
Goldstein, L. B., & Davis, J. N. (1990). Current Concepts of Cerebrovascular
     Disease and Stroke. Restoratiave Neurology: Drugs and Recovery Following
     Stroke, 21, 1636-1640. doi:10.1161/01.STR.21.11.1636