FIGHTING BACK AGAINST STROKE: Another Reason to Defend the NIH

By Don  C. Reed

Here is a riddle, but it is not a joke.

What is the number one cause of disability? (Hint:  it is also the number two cause of dementia, and the number three cause of death among adults.)

Awakened  in the middle of the night by  a noise, “clonk”, like a door closing, I felt a slight headache. Strangely, I had to “spell out” words in my mind before I could say them: “M-y–n-a-m-e–i-s–D-o-n”, visualizing them, letter by letter.

Not realizing what  I was up against, I took two Aspirin and went back to sleep. What I should  have done was go to the Emergency Room– and told them  I might be having a stroke.

There is a medication called a “clotbuster”, which can lessen stroke damage, if you take it within 4 to 5 hours of the incident. I missed the deadline.

The damage? My fingers lost much strength and coordination; my typing speed went down by half, and had (still has)  many errors.  My boyhood  stammer  returned.  I often “block” and cannot start a sentence, so I just stand there with my mouth open– nothing coming out.

Even so, I was lucky.

I could have become paralyzed, descended into madness—or died.

In America alone, approximately “800,000 people will have a stroke this year… 140,000 will die of it…(1)”

The numbers involved are huge. “…over 7 million stroke survivors live in the  United States and two-thirds of them are currently disabled.” (2)

What happens?

“A stroke occurs when a blood clot blocks a vessel in the brain…cells begin to die within minutes…”

With a direct cost to America of $35 billion per year (indirect costs like missed work can triple the amount) stroke is financially and physically devastating. (3)

But the American research community is fighting back.

Dr. Gary Steinberg, M.D., PhD., is the founder and co-director of the Stanford Stroke Center (where) he has practiced neurosurgery…for more than 37 years (4). As he puts it, , “We are now in a position to begin understanding how stem cells communicate with the brain to elicit recovery after a stroke….we intend to focus on the mechanisms of recovery including modulating the immune system and resurrecting neural circuits through transplanted stem cell secreted factors.” How beautiful those five  words are: “to elicit recovery after stroke…”

Consider: current  therapy only works if used within four to five hours after the stroke.  Instead, if the Steinberg stem cell approach is fully effective,  future stroke sufferers might have five years or more to analyze the injury and prescribe a therapy.

CIRM, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, is challenging stroke,  attempting to use different types of stem cells—“neural stem cells, embryonic, and reprogrammed… to repair damaged circuits following a stroke…”.(5)

Scientists seek to learn how best to deliver cells into the brain. “…researchers are seeing if it’s possible to activate the stem cells in the brain to repair the damage.

It is hard to overestimate  the potential benefits from a cure of stroke. Many related diseases and conditions might benefit, from paralysis to Parkinson’s Disease.