Carlstien's Blog – December 2010 Archive (4)

A newborn baby has become the first in the world to receive xenon gas treatment, pioneered in Bristol in a bid to prevent brain injury.



Riley Joyce had no pulse and was not breathing when he was first delivered by emergency Caesarean section at the Royal United Hospital, Bath.



He had a 50:50 chance of permanent brain injury and was transferred to St Michael's Hospital, Bristol.



His parents agreed to the experimental treatment and Riley is now doing… Continue

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Nearly 400,000 U.S. children and teenagers go to the emergency room for basketball-related injuries each year -- with the number of concussions and other brain injuries on the rise in recent years, researchers reported Monday.



Using government data collected from a national sample of U.S. hospitals, the researchers estimate that more than 4.1 million kids between the ages of 5 and 19 visited an ER for a basketball injury between 1997 and… Continue

ScienceDaily (Nov. 16, 2010) — Standard MRI scans have so far been unable to produce satisfactory images of nerve bundles. However, this is now possible using an MRI technique called Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI). Matthan Caan succeeded in improving the DTI method during his PhD research at TU Delft, enabling him to produce more accurate images of the damage that radiotherapy and chemotherapy cause in young leukaemia patients.



With MRI, images can be obtained of various parts of the… Continue

ScienceDaily (Dec. 8, 2010) — A new study uncovers a mechanism linking a specific type of cellular stress with brain damage similar to that associated with neurodegenerative disease. The research, published by Cell Press in the Dec. 9 issue of the journal Neuron, is the first to highlight the significance of the reduction of a specific calcium signal that is directly tied to cell fate.



Body cells are constantly exposed to various environmental stresses. Although cells possess some… Continue