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Researchers at Children's Hospital Boston have used a naturally occurring substance to help stroke-impaired rats ''rewire'' their brains and partially recover motor function, according to a study being published in the June 25 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
After a stroke, brain cells die and their connections to other parts of the brain are lost. Researchers believe that undamaged brain cells in other brain regions can potentially establish new connections to those areas that have lost their normal inputs, and that this ''rewiring'' could result in a limited amount of spontaneous recovery after a stroke.
In the study, inosine was shown to stimulate nerve cells in undamaged parts of the brain to grow new connections into brain areas that had lost their normal connections as a result of a stroke. This ''rewiring'' partially compensated for the loss of the original connections, and resulted in significant improvement in several types of behavior compared to rats that did not receive inosine.
''These findings are of both scientific and clinical interest,'' said Larry Benowitz, Ph.D., director of the Laboratories for Neuroscience Research at Children's Hospital Boston, and the principal investigator of the study. ''The study shows that inosine induces a great deal of rewiring in the brain after stroke. This rewiring is apparently sufficient to promote substantial functional recovery. In terms of clinical implications, inosine, which appears to have no apparent side effects in animals thus far, has potential as a novel nerve regeneration approach to treatment of stroke and other types of brain injuries.''
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