Scientists at UCSF have discovered a way of dramatically reducing epileptic seizures in half of the mice tested, and getting rid of seizures completely in the other half.
Here's how it works: the scientists inject a certain type of cells into the hippocampus region of the brain. During a seizure, muscles will contract forcefully, and sometimes conscience is lost. The cells that are injected into the brain make those muscles that contract be less excited, so that they won't contract. This is a one-time injection, because instead of treating the symptoms, it actually treats the problem. This procedure could eventually be used on humans, reducing the number of seizure-related injuries and deaths.
Article:
http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2013/05/05/epilepsy_cured_in_mice_using_brain_cells.html
NOS themes:
1. Science is collaborative. A team worked on this project.
2. Science is based on evidence. The way the scientists know this works is through experiments.
8. Importance of repeatability. Many mice were used, and the scientists got similar results every time.
Wow, I think that's really cool that cures for life threatening conditions such as seizures are out there and how scientists have used these newer methods of finding the cure. This type of work fascinates me greatly and seeing the potential of the research in manipulating certain cells to have favorable traits and then inserting them to remove the bad ones is something that seems like it could greatly help us. I did research on something similar to this post and I found how scientists are using stem cells to restore people who have been paralyzed from an accident.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-202207/Stem-cells-offer-cure-paralysis.html
This is very interesting because of how many people have been affected by this condition. I did research on how people are currently treating humans for epilepsy, and because major causes include damage to the brain in the prenatal period or during birth, brain tumors, and head trauma resulting from accidents, surgery is the only current way of curing epilepsy in humans, but because each year just 3,000 to 4,000 of the more than 2.5 million epileptics in this country are candidates, the rest must be treated with anti-epileptic drugs intended to prevent seizures.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.umdnj.edu/umcweb/marketing_and_communications/publications/umdnj_magazine/hstate/win98/epicure.html