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Can the damaged brain repair itself?

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    Can the damaged brain repair itself?

    I came across this video (June 2013), which is by one of the directors of the Anne Rowling Clinic in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Named after the founder's mom, author J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame, who died from complications of MS.)

    For those that may not know this, Scotland also has one of the highest incidences of MS in the world.

    Chandran believes that hope lies in a new discovery — that the brain can spontaneously repair itself. Just not well enough to overcome disease. He shows an image of a brain affected by MS, where damaged cells on the brain are being spontaneously repaired — not by doctors, he says, but in spite of them, because stem cells in the brain are allowing new myelin to be laid down over the damaged nerves.

    How can easily pluripotent stem cells be useful for repairing the damaged brain? There are two ways. First, we can discover new drugs in a dish. Take a patient skin sample, reprogram it to make pluripotent stem cells and drive it to make a motor nerve cell, and ask how it compares to a healthy counterpart cell from a relative with a close genetic match.

    We can also use stem cells to repair damage, whether by activating those already in our brains to respond appropriately to damage, or by transplanting stem cells directly to replace dead or dying cells in the brain. You can read more here http://blog.ted.com/2013/06/12/regen...than-chandran/ or just watch the video below.

    {Learned a new word, too ~ Pluripotent - which means many (pluri) potentials (potent). In other words, these cells have the potential of taking on many fates in the body, including all of the more than 200 different cell types. Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent, as are iPS cells that are reprogrammed from adult tissues. When scientists talk about pluripotent stem cells they mostly mean either embryonic or iPS cells. http://www.cirm.ca.gov/our-progress/...ll-definitions}


    I thought this was an informative video that offers hope (along with explaining why it's real hope) to diseases like ALS and MS:

    http://www.ted.com/talks/siddharthan...tself#t-945283
    Kimba

    “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” ― Max Planck
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