Smooth Pebbles : Controlling Cellular Gates Curbs Damage after Strokes

Profile

Author and journalist David Dobbs writes on science, medicine, and culture for the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Scientific American Mind, and other publications; "Buried Answers," one of his features for the Times Magazine, will appear in Houghton Mifflin's esteemed 2006 Best American Science and Nature Writing. The author of three books (see below), he is currently working on a book about the experience and neurobiology of fear. You can find more of his work at his website.

BOOKS by David Dobbs

Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral.
Oliver Sacks calls it "brilliantly written, almost unbearably poignant... The coral reef story becomes a microcosm of the conflicts -- between idealism and empiricism, God and evolution -- which were to split science and culture in the nineteenth century, and which still split them today.”

The Great Gulf
An epistemological argument disguised as fish fight.

The Northern Forest (with Richard Ober)
An environmental debate misses the most essential relationships in the ecosystem at hand.

Search this blog

« A gate to stop stroke damage | Main | Funding to prevent homegrown terror? No go. »

Controlling Cellular Gates Curbs Damage after Strokes

Category: Brains and minds • Medicine
Posted on: October 24, 2006 2:37 PM, by David Dobbs

Stroke damage in a human brain

_____________________________________________

Horrors: I've forgotten to post several articles I wrote about findings presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference last week. I'll work my way backwards, I suppose, so here's the latest, about a University of Milan discovery that blocking a certain cell-wall gate in the hour after stroke (in a lab rat) could prevent almost all damage.

Check it out at Scientific American.

Comments

Wow, that's incredible. It that a demonstation model of stroke damage or an actual brain damaged by stroke. Are there any other pictures?

Any background if it is an actual brain? ie. What type of cognitive difficulties were encountered, etc.

Thanks.

Posted by: MrvnMouse | October 24, 2006 4:11 PM

The photo is not directly related to the research, which was on lab rats -- it's a stock photo from the sciam.com story, so I've actually no idea of the history of that brain. But it seemed an arresting image.

Posted by: David Dobbs | October 24, 2006 10:04 PM