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| Our brains can grow new cells |
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| Author : Royal Society of New Zealand
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| Created : 08 Aug 2003
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| Last Revision : 08 Aug 2003
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Our brains can grow new cells
Most of us grew up thinking that we are born with a certain number of brain cells and that is all we have for the rest of our lives. From there, we were told, it is just a gradual decline into senile dementia as brain cells die off. But it turns out that this is not necessarily so.
Richard Faull is a professor of anatomy at the University of Auckland's School of Medicine and his team has discovered that our brains actually produce new cells regularly. The even more exciting news, he says, is that our brains produce more new cells when they are affected by a neuro-degenerative disease such as Huntington's, Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease.
The discovery throws out the doctrine that our brain cells are irreplaceable and it opens the door to new treatments of neuronal diseases as well as epilepsy and stroke. "We've known for some time from animal brains that they produce new nerve cells, but we thought that the human brain is special and too complicated to do that."
Professor Faull is the director of the Neurological Foundation's human brain bank in Auckland, the most precious and largest collection of human brains in the Southern Hemisphere. The brains have been donated by the families of people who died of neurological diseases as well as by healthy people who want to make a gift to science.
The researchers have studied hundreds of brains of people who died of Huntington's disease and discover that the sufferers' brains were trying to repair themselves by producing new cells to replace the dying neurones. "Our study shows that the generation of brain cells increases during the later stages of the disease, so the brain must be trying to replace the cells that are destroyed by it."
Professor Faull says the finding is reason for excitement because it is now possible to look for ways to increase the production of new cells to outrun the number that succumb to disease.
While the discovery gives new hope for future treatments there is also growing evidence that environmental influences play an important role in how well our brains function. "We have shown that mice with the Huntington gene develop symptoms later and less severely when they are kept in an enriched environment," Professor Faull says.
Royal Society of New Zealand
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