Reverse Stroke Damage (Within A 6-Hour Window)

❝Each year in the US, over half a million people have a first stroke; however, up to 80% of strokes may be preventable.❞

~ American Stroke Association

Source: New guideline: Preventing a first stroke may be possible with screening, lifestyle changes

If you’re reading this and thinking that it happens to other people, older people perhaps… There is a first time for everything, and most people are caught off guard by their first stroke.

Which means our health plan in this regard needs to be in two parts:

• let’s try to not have a stroke in the first place (which involves not assuming we are invulnerable right now)
• let’s try to minimize any damage done, and hasten recovery, if stroke strikes.

With regard to the first part, we’ve written about that before, including: Don’t Get Caught Out By These “Nontraditional” Stroke Risk Factors

And our most comprehensive article on the topic of stroke avoidance: Reduce Your Stroke Risk

To be truly well-prepared, you can also bear in mind: 6 Signs Of Stroke (One Month In Advance)

But what if stroke strikes?

Firstly, know this:

What To Do If Having A Stroke Alone? ← with the caveat that, if you have a stroke, there’s a good chance you’ll forget all this. However, this is good to know anyway, in case someone else is having a stroke (and if you don’t live alone, it can be good for whoever is with you to know this too).

And now there’s a new recourse: a Japanese team of researchers (Dr. Masanori Itakura et al.) have developed a drug that (per preliminary testing*, in any case) prevents the usual kind of harm done by stroke, if administered up to 6 hours after the stroke in question.

*So far, it’s completed the animal testing stage. Next is human models, and then actual humans.

How does it work, you ask?

In human blood there’s a protein (an enzyme, in fact) called glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH), and it has a lot of important jobs to do, including DNA repair, tRNA export, transcription membrane trafficking, heme metabolism, regulation of kinases, as well as cellular apoptosis and necrosis—which latter may sound bad, but individual cell death is an important part of the overall organism’s ongoing life. And by “the overall organism”, we mean you.

However, in stroke, this causes problems when this protein aggregates (clumps together), and starts killing everything it touches. You can probably imagine how that’s a bad thing to have happening inside your brain.

To combat this, the researchers developed a peptide to inhibit the aggregation of GAPDH, and gave this the catchy name of GAPDH aggregation inhibitor peptide-17, or GAI-17 to its friends.

In mice, GAI-17 significantly mitigated brain cell death and paralysis even when given up to six hours* after a stroke. The drug showed no significant side effects, including no harm to the heart or blood vessels.

*It was tested at 3, 6, and 9 hours. In the first two cases (at 3hrs and 6hrs) it was very effective; in the latter case (at 9 hours), it performed only marginally better than control.

You can see the paper itself, and graphs of the results, here: Inhibition of GAPDH aggregation as a potential treatment for acute ischemic stroke

And a pop-science article with some additional speculation, here: Six-hour ‘undo’ button: GAI-17 rewinds stroke damage and may beat Alzheimer’s

Want to learn more?

Here’s a good way to get started, by asking the right questions:

12 Questions For Better Brain Health

Take care!