Progesterone May Help Heal Brain Injury?
Could you imagine how the medical field would change if brain injuries could be healed/fixed if a discovery of how to fix the damaged tissue was found? Millions of brain damaged patients would rejoice if something like such was discovered, and we may be closer than some think to such discovery. Doctor Donald G. Stein is a brain researcher and university administrator who has done many test on rats and the recovery time from brain damage. He noticed that after drilling into a rats skull and vacuuming out sections of the brain to see the affect on their behavior, that some female rats promptly recovered from the injuries while the males remained impaired.
This got him to thinking that perhaps the female hormone, progesterone- a natural female hormone that protects fetuses in the womb, - aided in the healing process of the injured brains in the female rats. Stein has been working on a hypothesis that states progesterone may help protect and heal injured brains which if proven to be correct will change many things in the medical field when it comes to dealing with brain injuries in humans. Even raising such a question as to healing injured brain tissue has overturned medicial orthodoxy that states that brain tissue, once injured, stays that way which is a feat in itself. And while Stein and his medical colleagues are not sure of the outcome of a large-scale human trial over the next several years, it could possibly produce a new treatment for the estimated 10 million people world-wide who suffer traumatic brain injuries each year. Wouldn’t that be grand?
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