No, the scientists of . received a lot of trust from other researchers the hospital UMC Utrecht not twelve years ago, when they started their research. A therapy was developed with nasal drops, which was recently tested on ten young babies. The newborn babies had all suffered a stroke shortly after birth.
Such an infarction is usually caused by a blockage of a blood vessel in the brain. The children can have problems as a result, such as learning or behavioral problems, motor problems or epilepsy.
Results
So now the researchers have found a treatment method for these patients. Next month, the medical scientific journal The Lancet Neurology published an article with the results of the study.
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“We have always believed in the therapy,” Cora Nijboer, neuroscientist who led the research team, told RTL Nieuws. The reason for that is that newborn babies have a lot of repair mechanisms in their brains. “Every baby has its own brain stem cells. Those cells should lend you a hand.”
And that’s what the drops do: they pass ‘a kind of sieve bone in the nose’ and are then absorbed into the blood vessels of the meninges or the cerebrospinal fluid. “In this way they migrate within a few hours to the place in the brain where the brain damage is,” explains Nijboer.
Efficient
“In the beginning, when our results of the preclinical research were first seen, they thought: you can’t do that through the nose, can you?” adds Manon Benders, professor of neonatology. “But this route is very efficient. It’s actually quite special that it works like this.”
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It works so well because the damaged area in the brain sends out ’emergency signals’. Thanks to these signals, the stem cells know exactly where they should be in the brain. There, the stem cells then produce substances that activate the repair mechanism of their own brain stem cells. Exactly how effective the drops are has yet to be researched.
As quickly as possible
After an infarction, it is not necessary to wait too long before administering the drops, the researchers say. Nijboer: “If you wait too long, those alarm signals become less strong and it is more difficult for the stem cells to find their way to the right area.” Within how many days the treatment should start is difficult to determine.
“We know from animal experiments that we can wait up to ten days. But in the study with babies, we administered the drops within seven days after we determined through an MRI scan that they had had an infarction.”
‘This is promising’
After that, the researchers kept a close eye on the babies. The MRI scan three months later showed no strange new tissue that shouldn’t be there. According to Benders, the nasal drops therefore appear to be a safe method. According to her, it is an important step towards a new therapy for children who could not be treated before. Benders: “This is promising.”
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