2/25/16

Potential of Growing New Brain Tissue

Brain damage from injury and illness significantly decreases the quality of life while increasing medical costs. Obviously growing new brain tissue to replace that lost to bring recovery and full normal brain health is a good idea. I wondered how much work is being done in that area of research.

Football players, schizophrenics, the Alzheimer's afflicted, casualties of war, accident survivors and victims of crime may show brain quantity loss/reduction in size that could be repaired with new brain tissue growth. Aging too presents some brain size reduction, though a brain may function well qualitatively even so in that case.


Schizophrenia patients examined with magnetic resonance imaging show substantive brain area loss. The brain may short circuit and communicate with itself independently and inappropriately of the personality of the individual who may experience the phenomena with substantial discomfort. Drugs to counteract the effect may cost $3000 monthly, and that sort of cost can be afforded just by the rich and government printing out deficit dollars at the Federal Reserve. Thus it would be cheaper over time to regrow damaged brain tissue in such individuals than to dope them.

I wonder if the public generally wouldn't have better health if magnetic resonance brain scans were available one every five years or so to all Americans at no charge in order to help people determine the state of their own brain health. I think that breast scans are available free to most women (they should be if not); the brain is perhaps of more importance even than boobs, that obviously are of great value too.

Alzheimer's patients care is very costly. The families are challenged to keep a good face on long term decrease of health. Stopping Alzheimers from increasing is a valuable goal, yet so too would be restoring brain tissue lost to the disease.

Maybe DARPA is funding research on how to regrow brain tissue lost to combat casualties that could be given over to the regular medical research community if successful. Football players that have suffered brain damage; perhaps O.J. Simpson is an example, may act with less than full rational thought or take their own life because of the negativity of the state of being they exist in.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_healing






http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/new-87-deceased-nfl-players-test-positive-for-brain-disease/

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