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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – Researchers have known for a while that reducing body temperature can protect the brain against brain cell loss. They’ve seen cases that show people who have survived hours after cardiac arrest with no brain damage if they’ve fallen into icy water. Scientists have also harnessed this power already by artificially cooling the brains of newborns with oxygen deprivation to prevent brain damage. Now they are attempting to investigate the mechanism that protects the brain when the body is cooled in order to test a future treatment for Alzheimer’s or other neurodegenerative diseases.
At the University of Leicester, Giovanna Mallucci and her research team were able to simulate the effects of body cooling on mice so to study RBM3, a protein associated with “cold-shock” and linked with preventing cell loss in the brain. Cold-shock proteins are activated when a body is cooled or during hibernation in animals. When bears, mice or other animals go into hibernation, about 20-30% of their synapses, or brain connections, break down in order to preserve energy for other areas of the body. As the animals awaken and warm up, the connections are reformed without any damage to the brain. Although RBM3 is evidenced to protect the brain, scientists are still unsure of how it does so.
In this study, the research team cooled mice to a body temperature of 16-18 degrees Celsius for forty-five minutes, similar to the body temperature of a small animal in hibernation. They found that the synapses in the mice’s brain dismantled when the body was cooled and regenerated when the body was warmed. They repeated the experiment on mice bred with features of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and found that as the disease progressed, the regeneration of synapses in the mice fell, correlating with decreased levels of RBM3. By artificially boosting RBM3 levels, they saw that it protected the brains of the mice with Alzheimer’s-like characteristics by preventing loss of brain cells.
By learning more about how these cold-shock proteins affect synapse regeneration, scientists will be able to work on developing a drug that mimics the protective effect on the brain. And in the case of neurodegenerative diseases where there may be many unknowns, discovering mechanisms behind the cold-shock proteins that help protect nerve cells could have wide-reaching applications.
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