I watched a Tedtalk called, "Can the brain repair itself" under the list for TBI. I chose this topic because I personally know people who have suffered from a traumatic brain injury and I was interested in learning if the brain could in fact repair itself. I know there is no cure for a TBI and the title of the video caught my attention as to wonder if there were new discoveries that could benefit a person with a TBI. I am always interested in learning about advances in medicine and this video was perfect for me to watch!
The gentleman in the video began by talking about new hope for the future for individuals with neurological disorders and shared a story and video clip of a man named John who also has motor neuron damage. Images of the brain were shown to distinguish the differences in a normal brain and one that has been damaged. As we learned in class, a ABI can be traumatic or non-traumatic. The neurological conditions that were shown were a result from other disorders which lead to the brain injury. This would be classified as a non-traumatic brain injury. After seeing all of this damage and learning that the annual cost for neurological conditions is 700 billion dollars, the doctor finally reveals to us the hope for the future, stem cells!
We have known about stem cells for a long time and we have the understanding that they can regenerate new healthy cells while killing off the bad cells. We have stem cells already in our brain, but the thing that we have not figured out is how to activate them to work when we have an issue. This doctor performed a study where they injected stem cells into an individual who had multiple sclerosis and that results where an increase in the optic nerve size, whereas the person was suffering from a decline in the size of the nerve due to MS. He stated in the video that he did not believe that the new stem cells actually took over but that they activate the stem cells that were already in the person which is ground breaking advances in this medicine. He believes that a drug needs to be produced to make these stem cells become activated because of the timely process that it takes to produce these stem cells in a lab. Making these discoveries could lead to finding a cure for many individual neurological conditions in the future and I am looking forward to seeing more news about stem cells in the near future!
I encourage you to watch this video, which I have provided the link for below. This is really an eye opening discovery that could lead to many improvements in the field of medicine and could mean finding cures that have been studied for so long!
Link: https://www.ted.com/talks/siddharthan_chandran_can_the_damaged_brain_repair_itself#t-774658
Chandran, S. (2013). Can the damaged brain repair itself? Retrieved July 22, 2019, from
https://www.ted.com/talks/siddharthan_chandran_can_the_damaged_brain_repair_itself#t-
774658
Monday, July 22, 2019
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