New treatment brings hope to traumatic brain injury patients
8:41 p.m. Wednesday, March 21, 2007
After a normal day at work, a car crash changed Robert Smith's life forever.
"They thought that I was either dead or I was gonna die before they got me out into the street, into the ambulance," brain injury survivor Robert Smith said.
He made it to the hospital.
"I wasn't expected to live at that point, but if I did make it through a few days, then they thought that I would live and my best prognosis would be a vegetable," Smith said.
Fast Facts
- Each year, 1.4 million Americans experience a traumatic brain injury, or TBI.
- Brain injury can have serious consequences. About 5.3 million Americans have some degree of disability from a TBI and need help performing daily activities.
- Doctors at Emory School of Medicine have recently completed a trial of a drug, progesterone, to see if the medication can help protect the brain after TBI.
General information about traumatic brain injury is available from the Brain Injury Association of America, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
Robert credits the drug progesterone for his remarkable recovery. As part of a clinical trial, he was injected almost immediately and repeatedly through an IV for three to four days after his accident. After two months in a coma, he woke up as if he'd just been sleeping.
"What progesterone seems to do is reduce swelling of the brain to almost nothing," neurobiologist Dr. Donald Stein said.
And at the same time, stimulating growth and repair.
"There's lots of toxic sludge, to use that expression, that actually builds up in brain as a result of an injury, " Stein said. "And progesterone helps support cells to get rid of, to clear that, those toxic chemicals that stimulate cells to death for example."
Robert was one of 100 people included in this first-of-its kind study.
"What we found was that at 30 days post-injury, mortality was cut by over close to 57%, I believe, in the patients receiving the treatment compared to the controls," Stein said.
Researchers hope to get the same results in a bigger clinical trial this summer. The hope is progesterone can become a general purpose treatment for all brain trauma.
Another potential use of progesterone would be to treat soldiers on the battlefield.
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