Strokes occur when a brain clot blocks blood flow in parts of the brain, essentially starving groups of neurons of oxygen, which is necessary for normal function. Nearly 130,000 of the 795,000 strokes Americans suffer annually result in death, accounting for roughly 5% of deaths in the U.S. The remaining 665,000 stroke patients suffer a wide variety of side effects ranging from complete loss of motor function to loss of speech to a catatonic state. Because of the horrific nature of these cerebrovascular events and their consequences, many clinical researchers focus on prevention, rehabilitation and restoration of function for stroke victims.

A technique developed through these efforts utilises transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to improve language function in stroke patients with chronic aphasia. Patients who have undergone this procedure have previously reached a plateau in their ability to produce fluent language, despite signs of understanding and frustration at their inability to communicate.

‘The heart of our work is to use non-invasive brain stimulation

Surgeons at University Hospitals Case Medical Center, Cleveland, are working to reduce serious complications that have been known to occur with colorectal operations. In addition to using a set of pre-and postoperative standards that speed recovery which they have been publishing on for more than a decade, the researchers have validated yet another step surgeons can take to further reduce patients

Discovering that mouse hair has a circadian clock – a 24-hour cycle of growth followed by restorative repair – researchers suspect that hair loss in humans from toxic cancer radiotherapy and chemotherapy might be minimised if these treatments are given late in the day.
The study found that mice lost 85 percent of their hair if they received radiation therapy in the morning, compared to a 17 percent loss when treatment occurred in the evening.
The researchers, from Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of California, Irvine (UCI), worked out the precise timing of the hair circadian clock, and also uncovered the biology behind the clockwork – the molecules that tells hair when to grow and when to repair damage. They then tested the clock using radiotherapy.
‘These findings are particularly exciting because they present a significant step towards developing new radiation therapy protocols that include minimising negative side effects on normal tissues, such as hair or bone marrow, while maintaining the desired effects on cancer cells,’ says Maksim Plikus, assistant professor of developmental and cell biology at UCI and the study’s first author. ‘We will now apply our findings to design novel circadian rhythm-based approaches to cancer therapy.’
The scientists can’t say their findings will directly translate to human cancer therapy because they haven’t yet studied that possibility. But they say it is becoming increasingly clear that body organs and tissues have their own circadian clocks that, when understood, could be used to time drug therapy for maximum benefit.
‘There are clocks everywhere in the body – clocks that have their own unique rhythm that, we found, have little to do with the central clock in our brains,’ says the study’s co-lead investigator, Satchidananda Panda, an associate professor in Salk’s Regulatory Biology Laboratory and an expert on circadian rhythm.
‘This suggests that delivering a drug to an organ while it is largely inactive is not a good idea. You could do more damage to the organ than when it is awake, repairing and restoring itself,’ says Panda. ‘If you know when an organ is mending itself, you might be able to deliver more potent doses of a drug or therapy. That might offer a better outcome while minimising side effects.’ Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Transplant teams have long tried to match the size of donor lungs to the size of the recipient as closely as possible, concerned that lungs of the wrong size could lead to poor lung function and poor outcomes. But new Johns Hopkins-led research suggests that oversized donor lungs may instead be the best option for patients, finding they are associated with a 30 percent increased chance of survival one year after the operation.
The issue of lung size was brought into the spotlight recently with the case of a 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl in need of a lung transplant. Regulations have made children under the age of 12 ineligible to receive adult lungs, primarily because of the potential size mismatch. Her situation sparked a national debate on organ allocation procedures, and her family successfully petitioned the courts to enable her to receive lungs from an adult.
‘Despite what we thought, bigger lungs turn out to be better,’ says Christian A. Merlo, M.D., M.P.H., a lung transplant expert at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and senior author ‘The survival rates for lung transplant, unfortunately, are not as good as with other solid organ transplants like liver, kidney and heart. But our study tells us that if we were to routinely transplant larger lungs into patients, we could potentially make a real impact on survival. And that