Deep Brain Stimulation May Help Hard-to-Control High Blood Pressure

JANUARY 24, 2011
Deep Brain Stimulation May Help Hard-to-Control High Blood Pressure

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Researchers were surprised to discover what may be a potential new treatment for difficult-to-control high blood pressure, according to a case report published in the January 25, 2011, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The report involved one man who received a deep brain stimulator to treat his pain from central pain syndrome that developed after a stroke. Deep brain stimulation uses a surgical implant similar to a cardiac pacemaker to send electrical pulses to the brain.

The 55-year-old man was diagnosed with high blood pressure at the time of the stroke, and his blood pressure remained high even though he was taking four drugs to control it.

While the electrical stimulation did not permanently alleviate his pain, researchers were surprised to see that stimulation decreased his blood pressure enough that he could stop taking all of the blood pressure drugs.

“This is an exciting finding as high blood pressure affects millions of people and can lead to heart attack and stroke, but for about one in 10 people, high blood pressure can’t be controlled with medication or they cannot tolerate the medication,” said Nikunj K. Patel, BSc MBBS, MD, FRCS, of Frenchay Hospital in Bristol, UK, who wrote the case study.

Patel noted that the decrease in blood pressure was a response to the deep brain stimulation, and not a result of changes to his other conditions.

The man’s blood pressure gradually decreased after the deep brain stimulator was implanted in the periaqueductal-periventricular grey region of the brain, which is involved in regulating pain. His blood pressure was controlled for the nearly three years of follow-up; at one point he went back on an anti-hypertension drug for a slight increase in blood pressure, but that drug was withdrawn when the blood pressure went down again.

At one point researchers tested turning off the stimulator. This led to an increase of an average of 18/5 mmHg in blood pressure. When the stimulator was turned back on, blood pressure dropped by an average of 32/12 mmHg. Repeating the tests produced the same results.

“More research is needed to confirm these results in larger numbers of people, but this suggests that stimulation can produce a large, sustained lowering of blood pressure,” Patel said. “With so many people not responding to blood pressure medications, we are in need of alternative strategies such as this one.”

The American Academy of Neurology, an association of more than 22,500 neurologists and neuroscience professionals, is dedicated to promoting the highest quality patient-centered neurologic care. A neurologist is a doctor with specialized training in diagnosing, treating and managing disorders of the brain and nervous system such as Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, migraine, multiple sclerosis, brain injury, Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy. For more information about the American Academy of Neurology, visit http://www.aan.com.

http://www.aan.com/press/index.cfm?fuseaction=release.view&release=895

Earlier research showed that fresh memories, stored temporarily in a region of the brain called the hippocampus, do not gel immediately.

It was also known that reactivation of those memories soon after learning plays a crucial role in their transfer to more permanent storage in the brain's "hard drive," the neocortex.

During wakefulness, however, this period of reactivation renders the memories more fragile.

Learning a second poem at this juncture, for example, will likely make it harder to commit the first one to deep memory.

Bjorn Rasch of the University of Lubeck in Germany and three colleagues assumed that the same thing happens when we sleep, and designed an experiment to find out if they were right.

read more at
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-memories.html

Growth-Factor-Containing Nanoparticles Accelerate Healing of Chronic Wounds

ScienceDaily (Jan. 26, 2011) — Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators have developed a novel system for delivery of growth factors to chronic wounds such as pressure sores and diabetic foot ulcers.

In their work published in the Jan. 18 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team from the MGH Center for Engineering in Medicine (CEM) reports fabricating nanospheres containing keratinocyte growth factor (KGF), a protein known to play an important role in wound healing, fused with elastin-like peptides. When suspended in a fibrin gel, these nanoparticles improved the healing of deep skin wounds in diabetic mice.

"It is quite amazing how just one dose of the fusion protein was enough to induce significant tissue regeneration in two weeks" says the paper's lead author Piyush Koria, PhD, formerly a postdoctoral fellow at the MGH-CEM and now at the University of South Florida. "Previous reports have suggested that KGF can help heal chronic wounds. But in most studies the growth factor was applied to the surface of the wound, limiting its availability to deeper tissues and requiring repeat applications to produce any clinical benefit. Using large quantities of growth factor would make this therapy extremely expensive. Our work circumvents these limitations by more efficiently delivering KFG throughout the wound to stimulate tissue regeneration."

read more at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110126101957.htm

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