Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a serious public health problem in the United States. Recent data show that approximately 1.7 million people sustain a traumatic brain injury annually. While the majority of TBIs are concussions or other mild forms, traumatic brain injuries contribute to a substantial number of deaths and cases of permanent disability.
Currently, there are no drugs available to treat TBI: a variety of single drugs have failed clinical trials, suggesting a possible role for drug combinations. Testing this hypothesis in an animal model, researchers at SUNY Downstate Medical Center tested five drugs in various combinations.

Their observations, published recently in the journal PLoS ONE, suggest a potentially valuable role for minocycline plus N-acetylcysteine to treat TBI. The Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs recently cited this work, funded by the Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury Research Program, as an outstanding example of research.

Peter J. Bergold, PhD, associate professor of physiology and pharmacology at SUNY Downstate, and the article’s corresponding author, said: “There is great need for drugs to treat TBI. Perhaps the fastest way to get treatments to the clinic is to combine drugs already known to be both safe and effective. The combination of minocycline and N-acetylcysteine showed a large, synergistic improvement of cognition and memory after experimental traumatic brain injury. We are continuing these studies to get this combination in a clinical trial.”

written by Drugs Effects and Novel Drug Development

A powerful new imaging technique called High Definition Fiber Tracking (HDFT) will allow doctors to clearly see for the first time neural connections broken by traumatic brain injury (TBI) and other neurological disorders, much like X-rays show a fractured bone, according to researchers from the University of Pittsburgh in a report published online in the Journal of Neurosurgery.
In the report, the researchers describe the case of a 32-year-old man who wasn’t wearing a helmet when his all-terrain vehicle crashed. Initially, his CT scans showed bleeding and swelling on the right side of the brain, which controls left-sided body movement. A week later, while the man was still in a coma, a conventional MRI scan showed brain bruising and swelling in the same area. When he awoke three weeks later, the man couldn’t move his left leg, arm and hand.

“There are about 1.7 million cases of TBI in the country each year, and all too often conventional scans show no injury or show improvement over time even though the patient continues to struggle,” said co-senior author and UPMC neurosurgeon David O. Okonkwo, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Neurological Surgery, Pitt School of Medicine. “Until now, we have had no objective way of identifying how the injury damaged the patient’s brain tissue, predicting how the patient would fare, or planning rehabilitation to maximize the recovery.”
Only the HDFT scan identified a lesion in a motor fiber pathway of the brain that correlated with the patient’s symptoms of left-sided weakness, including mostly intact fibers in the region controlling his left leg and extensive breaks in the region controlling his left hand. The patient eventually recovered movement in his left leg and arm by six months after the accident, but still could not use his wrist and fingers effectively 10 months later.
The study was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

written by Drugs Effects and Novel Drug Development

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written by Drugs Effects and Novel Drug Development