Introducing the brain: stroke recovery in infants (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, October 11, 2022, 00:46 (773 days ago) @ David Turell

The plasticity enables the other lobe to compensate:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-10-infant-brain-side-compensates-loss.html

"A clinical study conducted by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center has found that for children who had a major stroke to the left hemisphere of their brain within days of their birth, the infant's brain was "plastic" enough for the right hemisphere to acquire the language abilities ordinarily handled by the left side, while also maintaining its own language abilities.

"The left hemisphere of the brain is normally responsible for sentence processing (understanding words and sentences as we listen to speech). The right hemisphere of the brain is normally responsible for processing the emotion of the voice—whether it is happy or sad, angry or calm. This study sought to answer the question "What happens when one of the hemispheres is injured at birth?"

"The participants in this study developed normally during pregnancy. But around birth they each had a significant stroke, one that would produce debilitating outcomes in adults. In infants, a stroke is much rarer, but does happen in roughly one out of every four thousand births.

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"'However, this early plasticity for language is restricted to one brain region. The brain is not able to reorganize injured functions just anywhere, as more dramatic reorganization is not possible even in early life. This gives us great insights into the regions we might be able to focus on for potential breakthroughs in developing techniques for recovery in adults as well."

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"To assess long-term outcomes in their language abilities, participants were given language tests at 9 to 26 years of age and were compared to their close-in-age healthy siblings. They were also scanned in an MRI to reveal which brain areas were involved in sentence comprehension.

"The participants and their healthy siblings all completed the language tasks almost perfectly. The major difference was that the stroke participants processed sentences on the right side of the brain while their siblings processed sentences on the left side. The stroke participants showed a very consistent pattern of language activation in the right hemisphere, regardless of the extent or location of damage from the stroke to the left hemisphere. Only one of the 15 participants, who had the smallest stroke, did not show clear right hemisphere dominant activation.

"'It is also notable that many years after their strokes, our participants are all such highly functioning adults. Some are honor students and others are working toward or have gotten their master's degrees," says Newport. "Their achievements are remarkable, especially since some of their parents had been told when they were born that their strokes would produce life-long impairments.'"

Comment: It makes the same point as the other entry about the brain. Teh brain is built to help us and has the major ability to reorganize itself to satisfy all of our mental needs.