Thanks to a University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) brain injury study, scientists now have a real time window into how head injury affects thousands of individual cells and genes simultaneously in mice. This approach, reported in Nature Communication, and supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), could lead to precise treatments being developed for traumatic brain injury. “Instead of clustering responses according to categories of cells in TBI, we can now see how individual cells in those groups react to head injury,” said Patrick Bellgowan, Ph.D., program director at NINDS. UCLA professors, Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, Ph.D. and Xia Yang, Ph.D., and colleagues, [...]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has, for the first time, released specific guidelines for the treatment of young people with mild traumatic brain injuries, commonly referred to as concussions. An extensive review of the current research into mild traumatic brain injuries yielded the determination by a panel of experts as to the best practice based on the evidence. “It’s only recently that we started to have enough research to do this,” said Matt Gammons, the former president of the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine in an interview with Popular Science. “For a long time, we didn’t know a whole lot about brain trauma [...]

A team of researchers, in a Rutgers University study, has discovered two molecules that could be the basis for developing new drugs for the treatment of traumatic brain injuries. The study, which was recently published in the journal of Neurobiology of Disease, uncovered the findings. Lead author Bonnie Firestein, a professor of cell biology at Rutgers opined that damage caused by traumatic brain injuries isn’t just the result of the physical blow, but is connected to the release of a neurotransmitter referred to as glutamate. “I think that this opens up a whole new way of thinking,” Firestein said, “Because, if you want to help somebody [...]