Originally published October 20 2005
Discovery about brain injury challenges orthodox view of brain functioning
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A new study in Neuroscience suggests that brain injury can affect areas of the brain far from the site of injury, suggesting that scientists will have to reconsider many assumptions currently held about brain function.
"Our findings suggest that looking for functional changes beyond the injury site is critical to understanding the behavioral deficits caused by injury and assessing the options to accelerate recovery from those deficits."
The new study, published online Oct. 16 in Nature Neuroscience, focused on patients with injuries located on the right side of the brain, approximately between the temple and the ear, in areas known as the temporoparietal and ventral frontal cortex.
In 25 to 30 percent of stroke patients, injuries in these regions lead to a condition known as spatial neglect.
"Soon after the injury, these patients may forget to shave the left side of their face, fail to eat food on the left side of a plate or seem to be unaware of their left arm," says Corbetta, who is clinical director of the Stroke and Brain Injury Program at the Rehabilitation Institute of St. Louis, where the patients were recruited.
Approximately 90 percent of all cases of spatial neglect are linked to right-brain injuries and lead to difficulty paying attention to the left side; however, the condition can also result from left-brain injury and undermine right-side attention.
But they also revealed changes in other areas that were anatomically intact.
"Although all patients in this study had right-side injuries, at one month post-injury we found increases in activity in attention-controlling centers of the brain's left hemisphere, as well as sharp decreases in activity in corresponding areas of the injured hemisphere," Corbetta says.
In the six-month scans, these changes, including the large spikes in activity in attention centers in the left hemisphere of the brain, had mostly faded away, and the level of activity normalized in parallel to the recovery from attention deficits.
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