TBI

TBI and Stem Cells

Traumatic brain injury is a commonly occurring disease which causes the destruction of a normal brain function, leading to further physical, cognitive and emotional disorders.

Causes of TBI

traumatic brain injuries (concussion) affects your brain cell temporarily, with physical symptoms like headache, nausea, disability in balancing, smelling and speaking. Having blurred vision, illusion, ringing in ears, bad tastes. Mental symptoms included, memory and concentration difficulties, loss of consciousness for minutes, mood swings, depression, insomnia, or sleeping too much.

Mild

Traumatic brain injury is usually caused by a blow, bump or jolt to the head or the body, like falling, violence, car accidents, sport injuries and explosive blasts.

Treatments

traumatic brain injury can cause persistent headache, nausea, inability to wake up from sleep, loss of coordination. Bruising, torn tissues, bleeding and more physical damage to the brain. Mental symptoms including loss of consciousness up to several hours, agitation and profound confusion.

Severe

The main treatments at the present are hyperbaric oxygen, non-invasive brain stimulation, task-oriented functional electrical stimulation and behavioural therapy, but the treatments are not effective.

Recent study have found that a variety of stem cells can migrate to damaged brain tissue and treat TBI by further differentiation and replacing damaged brain tissue.

MSC

IPSCS

Mesenchymal stem cells are heterogeneous multipotent adult cells that can be isolated from bone marrow, and perivascular tissues. They have the ability of directional differentiation into mesenchymal and non-mesenchymal tissues. They play an important role in tissue regeneration of damaged tissues. MSCs can selectively migrate to the injured brain tissue of the TBI, and then differentiate into neurons and astrocytes to repair damaged brain tissue.

Induced pluripotent stem cells can self-renew and differentiate into various types of cells, so have promising clinical application prospects, they were first reported in 2006.

NSC

MAPC

Neural stem cells are self-renewing stem cells that can be further differentiated into neurons, glial cells and oligodendrocytes. Experiments proved that transplanted human NSCs may be an effective, long-term treatment for neurological recovery after brain injury

Multipotent adult progenitor cells are used because of their characteristics of differentiation into mesenchymal cells, visceral mesoderm, neuroectoderm and endodermIt. It was found that MAPCs could improve their spatial learning, information retention, memory retrieval and dyskinesia after 120 days of brain injury.

Although many studies have confirmed that stem cells have good effect in brain injury, the safety of stem cells, the route of injection, the time of injection and the specific mechanism are all factors that affect the clinical application of stem cells, and the important research point in the future study.