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New Blood, New Hope: Transfusions Protect the Brain from Stroke Damage

AHA Publisher — Sat, 22 Aug 2020 07:00:54 +0000

West Virginia University via EurekAlert – Muscle weakness permeates through one side of your body and your speech slurs. It’s a stroke. And you need to be rushed to the emergency room. Doctors replace your blood with the blood of a healthy person who’s never suffered a stroke. This blood swap lessens damage to your brain, and any neurological deficits from the stroke are nil. This is not mere wishful thinking. It is a potential breakthrough in stroke therapy based on mice research by West Virginia University neuroscientists. In the study, led by Xuefang “Sophie” Ren, research assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience, the team found that blood substitution therapy rescues the brains of mice from ischemic damage. Their article is published in Nature Communications. “What we were able to demonstrate is that if you remove part of the blood from a subject undergoing stroke, and replace that blood from a subject that’s never had a stroke, the outcomes of that stroke are profoundly improved,” said Ren, who’s also director of the WVU Experimental Stroke Core. The study is believed to be the first to show that blood replacement therapy leads to improved stroke outcomes in mice, a potential next step for stroke therapy in humans. Most strokes (ischemic) occur when the blood supply to the brain is interrupted, usually by a blockage of the arteries leading to the brain. While there is no known single medication for stroke, the only FDA-approved treatment for ischemic strokes is tPA, or tissue plasminogen activator, which dissolves the clot and improves blood flow. However, tPA typically must be administered within three hours of the stroke. Ren’s research indicates that blood transfusions can take place beyond that limited window – up to seven hours – and still have a positive impact. Replacing 20 percent of the blood in a mouse was enough to show a profound reduction in damage to the brain. The average adult holds around one-and-a-half gallons of blood in the body. The study’s co-authors include Heng Hu, postdoctoral fellow and Experimental Stroke Core surgeon, and James Simpkins, director of the Center for Basic & Translational Stroke Research and professor of the Department of Neuroscience. Out with the old, in with the new “The idea is to change the immune response that happens after stroke,” Simpkins said. Researchers explained that following a stroke, the makeup of a patient’s blood changes, causing disruptions in the brain and how the body responds. Neutrophils, a type of white blood cell that helps lead the immune system’s response, play a role in increasing the levels of an enzyme called MMP-9, which can lead to blood-brain barrier leakage and degeneration in brain tissue. Blood replacement therapy removes inflammatory cells and decreases neutrophils and MMP-9 levels following a stroke, the study concluded. “The immune system doesn’t recognize much of what’s happening when there’s a stroke,” Simpkins said. “So the neutrophils go to the brain and try to clean up the damage that happens. But there’s too much in the brain and those same neutrophils release MMP-9, which then exacerbates the damage. “What we learn is that stroke is simply not a cerebral vascular event. It’s a whole-body event. Both the brain and the body get signals that something’s going on in the brain and as the immune system responds to try to help, it actually worsens the outcome. Therefore, by removing the blood and replacing it with the blood of those that have not experienced stroke, we get good outcomes.” Currently, blood-based therapies are emerging as treatments to combat aging and fight neurodegenerative diseases, the researchers noted. Now, blood replacement therapy is a proven strategy that targets the pathological systemic responses to stroke, Ren said, and could reduce the mortality of stroke patients. “Blood indeed saves our brains and lives from stroke damage,” she said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 795,000 Americans experience a stroke each year and 140,000 die from it. “In an ideal circumstance, a person having a stroke would show up to Ruby (Memorial) or any hospital,” Simpkins said. “They’d go through the proper protocol. We would remove their stroke blood and magically restore it with the right kind of blood that would tamp down this immune response they’re experiencing. If it works out, that’s good for all of us.” To read the original article click here.

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We Love Coffee, Tea, Chocolate and Soft Drinks So Much, Caffeine Is Literally in Our Blood

AHA Publisher — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 08:00:49 +0000

Oregon State University via Newswise – Scientists at Oregon State University may have proven how much people love coffee, tea, chocolate, soda and energy drinks as they validated their new method for studying how different drugs interact in the body. Newswise — CORVALLIS, Ore. – In conducting mass spectrometry research, Richard van Breemen and Luying Chen worked with various biomedical suppliers to purchase 18 batches of supposedly pure human blood serum pooled from multiple donors. Biomedical suppliers get their blood from blood banks, who pass along inventory that’s nearing its expiration date. All 18 batches tested positive for caffeine. Also, in many of the samples the researchers found traces of cough medicine and an anti-anxiety drug. The findings point to the potential for contaminated blood transfusions, and also suggest that blood used in research isn’t necessarily pure. “From a ‘contamination’ standpoint, caffeine is not a big worry for patients, though it may be a commentary on current society,” said Chen, a Ph.D. student. “But the other drugs being in there could be an issue for patients, as well as posing a problem for those of us doing this type of research because it’s hard to get clean blood samples.” The study was published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis. In addition to caffeine, the research also involved testing pooled serum for alprazolam, an anti-anxiety medicine sold under the trade name Xanax; dextromethorphan, an over-the-counter cough suppressant; and tolbutamide, a medicine used to treat type 2 diabetes. All of the pooled serum was free of tolbutamide, but eight samples contained dextromethorphan and 13 contained alprazolam – possibly meaning that if you ever need a blood transfusion, your odds of also receiving caffeine, cough medicine and an anti-anxiety drug are pretty good. “The study leads you in that direction, though without doing a comprehensive survey of vendors and blood banks we can only speculate on how widespread the problem is,” said van Breemen, the director of OSU’s Linus Pauling Institute. “Another thing to consider is that we found drugs that we just happened to be looking for in doing the drug interaction assay validation – how many others are in there too that we weren’t looking for?” The purpose of the study by Chen and van Breemen was to test a new method for evaluating the potential for interactions between botanical dietary supplements and drug metabolism. The method involves rapid protein precipitation and ultra high pressure liquid chromatography and is being used to support clinical studies. In the clinical studies, participants take a drug cocktail along with a botanical supplement – hops, licorice or red clover – to see if the supplement causes any of the drugs to be metabolized differently than they otherwise would. “Botanicals basically contain natural products with drug-like activities,” van Breemen said. “Just as a drug may alter the drug-metabolizing enzymes, so can natural products. It can become a real problem when someone takes a botanical supplement and is also on prescription drugs – how do those two interact? It’s not straightforward or necessarily predictable, thus the need for methods to look for these interactions. The odd thing in this case was finding all the tainted blood.” Two individual donors who agreed to abstain from caffeinated foods and beverages had to be enlisted so the research could be completed. To read the original article click here.

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Saving Lives Faster: World-First Laser Incubator for Blood

AHA Publisher — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 03:18:41 +0000

Monash University via Science Daily – Researchers have developed the world’s first blood incubator using laser technology. This could prevent fatal blood transfusions in critically ill patients and can detect antibodies in pregnant women that can kill a baby in utero. To read the original article and learn more about this world-first blood incubator, click here.

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