Restoration of Brain circulation and cellular functions hours post-Mortem

The human brain is a very energy and oxygen demanding organ. Studies in humans and animals have shown that oxygen stores, electrical activity, and consciousness are lost in just seconds of lack of blood flow, while glucose and ATP stores are gone within minutes. Unless the blood flow is rejuvenated, in just 10 - 12 minutes of a lack of oxygen, the brain cells will die and the brain fails due to the lack of nutrients.
On April 17, 2019, a paper published in the journal Nature explained how scientists from Yale University plugged in 32 brains through the carotid artery from pigs slaughtered for food, which were dead for 4 hours, into the BrainEx system for 6 hours. This system pumped in oxygen, nutrients, compounds to prevent oxidation, chemicals to make sure that the brain did not gain consciousness, and stabilizing compounds such as a sodium channel blocker to decrease excitotoxicity, which normally causes cell death in the brain. This helps protect the neurons and provides resources for the brain cells. After 10 hours, MRI, CT and ECGs were performed to determine the brain’s activity. The scientists discovered that the pig brains had been largely intact and that even some brain cells were able to use glucose and oxygen and produce carbon dioxide. The cells also had some inflammatory response and had some neural activity in the synapses. However, these cells were not communicating with each other as shown by the ECG so no consciousness was detected after the experiment. These brains were not functioning but were cellularly active. When compared to the control brains, those brains had no neural activity while the experimental brains still had activity and looked relatively normal.
Even though, consciousness was not restored, this study is still astonishing since this displays the resilience of the brain tissue and that brain cells could be restored. However, this raises a lot of questions in both ethical issues and also what could be in store in the future. One big issue, is what if consciousness could actually be induced in the brain, this would completely redefine death itself. However, this study could also lead to huge advancements in the medical realm if patients could be saved if they were oxygen deprived from a MI or stroke. Future studies could look at if the brain could be preserved longer and this could also lead to new methods to study the postmortem brain.

References

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Disparities in Healthcare in People with Disabilities

One of the biggest health concerns today includes people with disabilities and their unmet needs of health care. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are over a billion people who are defined as disabled. Yet a recent survey of people with mental health disorders showed that 35-50% in developed countries and 76-85% in developing countries received no treatment in the year before the study. This means that several hundreds of millions of people with disabilities are not being treated in a timely manner leading to worsening conditions. The barriers to accessing health care include cost, limited health services geared towards the disabled, physical barriers, and lack of knowledge and skills from providers among other things like stigmatized views towards the disabled. Among the barriers to health care for people with disabilities include the discrimination and disparity of health care provided. In a qualitative study done in England pertaining to people with intell...
Read more

The truth about vaccines

The truth about vaccines “The government is trying to kill [people].” One woman claims as her reason for not vaccinating her child. “Vaccines cause autism,” another claims as if that is good enough reason not to protect her child. We hear about these stories so often these days that it is no longer surprising, but it should be. Shouldn’t it?   Currently, there is an outbreak of measles in New York, which is causing serious concern. A public health emergency was declared, and there is a possibility that people are hosting “measles party” in order to intentionally expose unvaccinated children to the disease. Measles is a highly contagious disease that can cause fever, cough, runny nose, and rash; it can also cause complications, such as pneumonia and encephalitis. Children could die from this disease. Edward Jenner (1749-1823) contributed greatly to foundation of immunology by suggesting that infection from cowpox protected against smallpox (Yes-he was not the first one...
Read more

Stigma Surrounding Mental Health

           Mental health has always been stigmatized and never been socially accepted like other diseases are in society. Throughout history, many mental health problems were explained by religious superstitions such as being possessed by a devil or demon and other bizarre things that people believed in. Many a time, people were killed for these reasons, which we are now finding were mental health disorders that people did not know about at the time. One outstanding example of that in history were the many cases of patients within mental institutions that had schizophrenia or dementia and were treated extremely poorly. They were not treated like patients in a hospital, but were often tied up, locked in rooms similar to jail cells, and in extreme cases underwent surgical procedures like lobotomies in which the anterior part of the frontal lobes were severed from the brain and sometimes removed completely. This left the patient without any personality, intel...
Read more