Saturday, June 7, 2008

Stroke me, Stroke me.

As good a way as any to get this going: announce the publication of my most recent scientific paper. It is, I hope, the end of a fairly fallow period for our lab, the Emergency Medicine Cerebral Resuscitation Laboratory at Wayne State University in Detroit. The paper has to do with the use of insulin in stroke, which is a subject I've been involved with since 1999. In that year, I published work showing that a very high dose of insulin administered to animals after 10 minutes of cardiac arrest could rescue protein synthesis in vulnerable brain cells. But we suspected that wasn't the only good thing insulin did for brains after ischemia. (Ischemia is the condition created when blood flow to an organ is interrupted, as in stroke, cardiac arrest, and heart attack.)

Since that first paper, the stroke research community has learned that one of the key events occuring in vulnerable brain cells during stroke is the release of a protein called cytochrome c from mitochondria. Mitochondria are the powerplants of every cell. And, as is the case elsewhere in life, it's just no good when your powerplant leaks. When mitochondria leak cytochrome c into the rest of cell, it's harmful to their ability to generate power, and leads to the production of free radicals. But more importantly, the leaking of cytochrome c is a self-destruct signal, causing the cell to off itself in a process called apoptosis.


In the new paper, my colleagues and I demonstrate that high-dose insulin administered to animals with brain ischemia prevents the release of cytochrome c and preserves brain cells after transient global brain ischemia, the kind of brain ischemia that can devastate patients resuscitated from even very brief periods of cardiac arrest. We are guessing that this approach has value in stroke and head trauma as well, although that remains to be proven.

You can see the abstract of the paper here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Very interesting, Sully. While I don't take care of adults, much less stroke victims, it's heartening to learn of advances that might make strokes less catastrophic for sufferers. (Never having done bench research myself, I have boundless admiration for those who do it.)

--Dan Summers (drdannyu elsewhere)