Archive for November, 2009
While most people turn to their Nintendo Wii for family fun or a game of Super Mario Galaxy, more and more physical therapists are turning to the popular gaming console for its rehabilitative purposes. In particular, therapists are using the Wii Fit program to help victims of brain injury recover with a more fun routine and to help end the monotony of traditional rehabilitation programs.
Increasingly known as “Wii-hab,” the incorporation of the Nintendo Wii into brain injury rehabilitation has taken advantage of the basic functions of the interactive joystick, as well as the body’s basic motions. As was intended by the creation of the Wii Fit program, the regular Wii user receives quite the workout from the program’s software and special interactive equipment. However, for rehabilitative purposes, a person recovering from brain or spinal injuries using the equipment can find considerably more benefit among the game’s simplicities.
For instance, just using the joystick’s buttons assists with the recovery of a patient’s basic motor skills. Making a routine of pressing buttons and flicking the wrist is not only fun for the person in recovery, but it also assists with recovery of regular motion and action in the fingers, hands, and lower arms. In other Wii sports games – such as bowling, tennis, baseball, golf, etc. – the motion of the joystick can help restore ranges of motion in the arms and legs. For the more advanced rehabilitation, newer games like Wii Fit Plus adds elements of balance, strength conditioning, stretching, aerobics, and yoga, as well as the traditional games and workouts.
Wii-hab – or Waggle Therapy as it is also known – continues to grow as a popular source for brain and spinal injury rehabilitation, and it is currently being utilized for its positive encouragement and therapeutic purposes in cases of stroke, motor vehicle accident, combat wounds, and even Parkinson’s disease.
BHR Pharma LLC, a subsidiary of the Belgian company Besins Healthcare SA, has been named the sole licensee of a new treatment that could very well be a monumental cure for traumatic brain injuries caused by serious debilitating blows to the head. The two-year old company is using a new treatment that involves the female hormone progesterone in eliminating and solving the effects of TBI.
In cooperation with Emory University, which granted the license to BHR Pharma’s President Tom MacAllister, the company plans to begin clinical trials in the beginning of 2010, recruiting recent victims of motor vehicle accidents with serious brain injuries from emergency rooms throughout the U.S. In all, BHR Pharma will begin clinical trials with 1,200 victims from 120 emergency rooms, while Emory University will conduct its own trials with 1,140 victims in 17 medical centers across the country. Both sets of clinical trials are purely cooperative and not competitive.
The progesterone treatment was invented in the 1980s, and was developed further by Emory’s Don Stein. BHR Pharma’s team will be able to use its own clinical trial results as well as the Emory trial results in manufacturing a complete treatment for federal approval. Researchers and medical professionals agree that this treatment is revolutionary, in that it is the first of its kind in suppressing and reversing secondary cell damage in the brain after serious trauma induced by an automobile accident.
Once approval is gained by BHR Pharma, the company intends to use the final treatment for victims within eight hours of their automobile accidents. For five days, the progesterone solution will be filtered into the victim’s system, as the hormone will reduce all inflammation in the brain and reverse the body’s natural inclination toward the spread of secondary cell damage.
Currently, there are no U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs or treatments for traumatic brain injuries, meaning that if BHR Pharma is successful the company will have pulled off a coup in modern medical science. With more than one million cases of TBI reported in U.S. emergency rooms each year, doctors and medical experts have only been able to use emergency surgery to treat these brain injuries.
In a study that appears in the medical journal Nature Nanomedicine, Purdue University researcher Ji-Xin Cheng has released a study that profiles a new treatment that could stop the secondary nerve damage caused by spinal injuries, as well as help restore movement in injury victims. By injecting tiny spheres known as copolymer micelles, rats that had suffered new spinal injuries immediately showed signs of recovery with no additional nerve damage.
The experimental surgery involves the injection of the tiny spheres, which then fuse to the initial injured nerves. This combination eliminates the possibility of inflammation and swelling in the surrounding nerves and tissues, thus decreasing the ultimate damage of the injury. Long used in surgeries and research as drug-carrying agents, the copolymer micelles are now used as a repair mechanism, something that is entirely new for these infinitesimally small spheres.
Because of the micelles’ makeup, the tiny bodies are perfectly suited to travel through the bloodstream and not face any decomposition or rejection from the body’s immune system, nor are they affected by bodily fluids, as they thrive in fluids. By using dyed micelles, the researchers were able to prove that the spheres traveled directly to the injured area and immediately fused to the membranes to being a reparation process.
So far, in the cases of testing rats, the toxicity tests show that this process is ultimately safe. Rats that were treated immediately after their injuries showed recovery signs in all four limbs. Some of the test subjects, however, did not fare as well. The next step for this Purdue team is to test the micelles on rats that have suffered a spine injury three hours before treatment. The research team believes that if they can make progress on animals that were not treated immediately after injury, then they might be able to use this treatment process in emergency rooms for humans after accidents that led to spinal injuries.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a new project that will aim to create a brain freeze device to halt the effects of brain trauma in wounded United States troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. DARPA attests that because of roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), traumatic brain injury has become the most common form of serious injury in fighting in the Middle East.
DARPA believes that in the same way that cold treatments help alleviate the symptoms of brain aneurysms and strokes, a freezing device could be applied to the victim’s head on the battlefield and stop the brain trauma from exceeding the initial stages of impact and injury. The initial impact obviously causes the primary damage to the brain, as the tissues and blood vessels stretch and tear. However, DARPA believes that this supposed device could stop the trauma immediately at this point, avoiding the more dangerous secondary damage that is caused as the brain cells rapidly deteriorate and die. The secondary damage to the brain is most commonly responsible for fatalities and irreversible loss of bodily functions.
The challenge for DARPA lies within the ability to harness a freezing mechanism that can stave off the advancement of brain damage without harming the entire brain. As with any treatment, each victim and patient differs in health and reaction to treatment, and in an environment as hostile as a battlefield, attention to detail is of the ultimate critical importance. It is because of this factor that it is assumed that any invented freeze device will operate with controls to regulate specific temperatures per each wounded soldier.
Induced hypothermia has been researched as a possible treatment for strokes, as the freezing temperature battles inflammation of the tissues and also decreases the body’s metabolism. This type of treatment has shown potential in the treatment of acute ischemic stroke victims, to be specific, as well as promising results in the treatment of lung cancer patients in previous British medical research.
Spinal cord injury patients around the world may draw new hope for the future from the story of a paralyzed little dog who was able to walk again after receiving an experimental spinal cord treatment. Cambridge University scientists pioneered the new treatment that made it possible for Henry the dachshund to walk after he was paralyzed by a severe spinal cord injury.
Veterinarians at the Cambridge Veterinary School took cells from the dog’s nose and injected them into his ailing spinal cord. The New York Daily News reported that nose cells were used because they encourage the growth of new nerve fibers in the spinal cord. Henry had lost the ability to walk at the end of last year when discs between the vertebrae in his spine ruptured. It was also reported that certain species of canines have an increased risk of spinal cord injuries, so they make good candidates for exploration of experimental treatments.
Scientists had previously reported success with the nose cell technique in experiments with rats, which inspire professors Nick Jeffrey and Robin Franklin to attempt the experimental procedure on the dachshund. The scientists hope to eventually use the procedure to treat human patients with severe spinal cord injuries.
In addition to the medical treatment, Henry received physiotherapy and rehabilitation on a treadmill. Only a month after getting the nose cell treatment, Henry was able to walk again. The poor little puppy was reportedly downtrodden and depressed before he received the procedure. Afterward, his owner reported signs of the dog’s returning happiness.
Sarah Beech, the owner of the lucky dachshund, was amazed by the miraculous results of the veterinary treatment. She was quoted in the New York Daily News article saying, “It’s incredible,” Henry’s owner, Sarah Beech, told the Daily Mail. “I didn’t think Henry would ever be able to walk again, but over the last few months, he has been wagging his tail and taking small steps.”
The news of such rapid success in reversing Henry’s paralysis should bring hopeful expectation to the many spinal cord injury patients waiting for such amazing treatments to be made available to humans. With all the recent advances in spinal cord injury treatments, it seems only a matter of time before paralysis is seen as a temporary, instead of irreversible, condition.
(pic from flickr.com/photos/franklin_hunting)
Upwards of 250,000 people suffer from severe spinal cord injuries, and many of those patients have lost the ability to use their arms, legs, or even most of their bodies. There are very few treatment options available for paralysis and spinal cord injury victims, but a recent article in Health Scout from the Ivanhoe Broadcast News reported on a controversial camp that is providing new hope for many patients. The camp in question is in Sanford, Florida, and patients at the camp are encouraged to get out of their wheelchairs and “stand on their own,” the article reported.
One patient, 20-year-old quadriplegic Amanda Perla, was mentioned in the article as being able to stand by herself with the help of a metal bar. Two years ago, Amanda was paralyzed in a tragic car accident on her prom night. She was told by doctors she would never walk again and would be bound to a powered wheelchair for the rest of her life, but six months later, with the help of the Step Up Recovery Center, she has transitioned to a manually powered wheelchair.
The owner and founder of the Step Up Recovery Center, Amanda Perla’s mother Liza Reidel, opened up the center as her response to the hopelessness and lack of available treatment options presented to her daughter by doctors. At the center, spinal cord injury recovery specialists prompt patients to get up out of their wheelchairs and perform “aggressive exercise and repetitive motions” in an attempt to “reorganize the nervous system,” the article read.
While some doctors have criticized the recovery center for providing false hope to its patients, the goals of the center are to “help patients regain function,” and to “possibly even walk again.” Although Amanda Perla is still bound to a wheelchair, she noted that she has already recovered beyond the expectations of her doctors, and she believes that with further treatment and rehabilitation she will walk again some day.
Clients at the recovery center undergo three-hour therapy sessions three or four times a week. While critics worry about giving patients false hope, the center advocates progressive action in the face of an otherwise dreary prognosis. It is a progressive advance to offer movement therapy and physical rehabilitation attempts to patients who would otherwise have resigned themselves to life in wheelchairs with no hope.
Although patients at the center have yet to walk again after paralysis, the increased movement and deliberate exercise is something the patients would not otherwise be exposed to, and in that sense, it provides a positive option where one did not previously exist.
(pic from flickr.com/photos/meanestindian)
The BBC recently reported on a 22-year-old man who died from multiple abscesses in his brain related to complications arising from his recent tongue piercing. The journal Archives of Neurology issued a report on the death of the young Israeli man and encouraged consumers to be aware of the dangers involved with such a piercing. A Dental Health Site article published on February 10 of this year gives a list of seven common oral hazards associated with tongue piercings.
Of the seven risks mentioned on the site, infection and death, blood loss and nerve damage, and Hepatitis or HIV infection are among the more serious dangers associated with oral piercing. Another health website, YgoY, reported on the possibly fatal dangers of tongue piercing back in December of 2007. In addition to mentioning the possibility of serious brain infection, the YgoY article also noted the potential for heart valve damage, blood poisoning, and speech impediments.
The BBC article discussed the more common dangers of tongue piercing, including oral infections, chipped teeth, recession of gum lines, and problems with uncontrolled bleeding. Professional piercers pointed out that using proper procedures and maintaining hygienic after-care protocols rarely lead to any complications, much less death from brain abscesses and infections.
Tongue piercing remains both widely popular and controversial. The BBC article named Mel B of the Spice Girls and Princess Anna’s daughter Zara Phillips among the celebrities with tongue piercings.
The scientific advisor to the British Dental Association, professor Damien Walmsley, told the BBC News, “Piercing of oral sites also carries with it a risk of infection. The clear message is that oral piercing is ill advised and should be avoided.” The Dental Health Site article also recommended caution and advised avoidance of tongue piercing altogether.
While the death of the Israeli man from brain abscesses due to complications with his tongue piercing is a rare case, the severity of it may make many consumers more cautious about getting an oral piercing. For many, the risk of brain damage and death may be enough to scare them away from the cosmetic procedure, while for others, the piercing will still be worth the risk.
(pic from wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons)
