Medication may reset the brains of stroke patients
UNITED STATES: Stroke patients could one day improve their recovery by taking medication that reverts their brains to a child-like state, scientists have suggested.
By boosting the brain’s ability to rewire itself, researchers believe it may be possible to bypass the damage and regain lost motor and language skills – in the same way already seen among children who have suffered strokes.
During early childhood, the brain is at its most plastic. This is one reason why children can learn languages so easily. It also means that babies can have severe strokes, shutting down as much as half their brain, and still be able to function as adults.
Elissa Newport, from Georgetown University Medical Centre, studied this ability using brain imaging and looked at children who have lost the entire use of the left side of their brain.
‘‘The right hemisphere, which is not in control of language in anyone healthy, is apparently capable of taking over if you lose the left,’’ she said. The children were able to talk normally, whereas adults with similar damage never can.
Newport is working with Takao Hensch from Harvard University, who has been part of a revolution in the understanding of brain plasticity, and the ‘‘critical period’’ of learning, to see if this can be exploited in medical treatment.
‘‘For many years, centuries even, it was generally thought that critical periods closed because we lost plasticity,’’ he said. In the past decade, however, researchers have shown the brain can be malleable in later life after all.
Hensch has gone further, finding it might be possible for drugs to induce plasticity.
In a small trial he used Valproate, used to treat epilepsy, to teach adults to recognise musical pitch, a skill that can ordinarily only be taught to children under the age of six.
He believes any stroke treatment will need to exploit one of the more surprising implications of his research: he thinks the brain does not lose the ability to rewire, it just makes molecules that suppress that skill. This could be because it is more useful to adults to have more fixed brain wiring.
Hensch admitted that the work on pitch pointed to a tantalising possibility for healthy people. ‘‘This strategy could help us learn new fabulous things just like we did in childhood,’’ he said.