For this Neuro note, I decided to listen to a TED talk called Can the Brain Repair itself? I found this TED talk under the resources that professor Lancaster provided for us. I chose this topic because I find learning about the brain fascinating, and I enjoy learning about new innovative techniques that could eventually lead to break throughs. The TED talk is done by Dr. Siddharthan Chandran, who is a regenerative neurologist in the UK. During the TED talk, Dr. Chandran talks about a technique that could offer hope for people who live with devastating and untreatable neurological diseases, including HD, MS, and ALS. He starts to explain that the brain is made up of different types of cells: nerve cells, myelinating cells, and oligodendrocytes. When they work together they create electrical activity that causes are ability to think, learn, move, and feel. When one of these cells get damaged, it causes slower conductions that turn into disease. For example: if the dying cell is a myelin cell, you end up with MS. As of right now, there is no hope for curing these diseases, but Dr. Chandran states the brain CAN repair itself, just not well enough. He talks about the function of stem cells to enable new myelin over the damaged nerve (which causes regeneration) and their ability to produce more of themselves, and also to become specialized to do certain things. He explains that in 2006, a scientist in Japan discovered that you can turn any cell into an adult stem cell by using 4 ingredients. This would be like making your own "repair kit" for your body. You could take a skin sample from a patient with a disease, add in the ingredients and turn it into their own stem cell. By doing so, you can track the individual health of the cell and compare it to the diseased cells (which are 2.5 times more likely to die). Dr. Chandran explains that you can use stem cells to repair damage in 2 different ways: to activate stem cells already in the brain to respond to damage, or to transplant cells to replace dying cells in the brain. He conducted a study that proved this in patients with MS. He wanted to see if stem cells from bone marrow would be protective of their nerves. In the study, they took bone marrow and stem cells in the lab and injected it back into the veins of the patients (this took 5 years). They then measured the size of the optic nerve in the patient to see if anything had changed, and sure enough, the stem cells proved to be working. Overall, I can relate this to the things we've been learning about in class. We have been learning about the different neurological diseases and the impact they have on people, and this TED talk shows techniques that could help them in the future and possibly cure these devastating diseases all together. I hope that this research can continue and provide hope for people living with these diseases. I definitely enjoyed learning about this, and would recommend this TED talk to anyone interested in neurological disorders.
Comments
Post a Comment