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Study Shows Damaged Human Brain Can Regenerate New Cells (With ILLUSTRATION)

Study Shows Damaged Human Brain Can Regenerate New Cells (With ILLUSTRATION)

Memories are made of this -- new brain cells

By Patricia Reaney

LONDON, March 14 (Reuters) - In a finding that could be good news for stroke sufferers and people with brain diseases, scientists said on Wednesday that the brains of animals and humans can produce new cells that can help to form memories.

Researchers had been sceptical about the brain's ability to grow new cells. But behavioural neuroscientists at Rutgers and Princeton universities in New Jersey have shown not only that the brains of rats produce new cells, but also what they do.

"It appears that the new neurons become involved in memory about a week to two weeks after they are generated, and they are involved in memories normally handled by the hippocampus (an area of the brain)," said Professor Tracey Shors of Rutgers.

She and her colleague Elizabeth Gould, of Princeton University, believe their research suggests that the brain's recuperative powers may have been underestimated and could be far greater than scientists had previously thought.

"I think the idea that the brain continues to make new neurons and that those neurons serve an important function gives us hopes that we can restore function in people who have neurone loss," Shors said in a telephone interview.

"On another level it may give ideas about trying to enhance the self-renewing capacity of the brain."

Jeffery Macklis, of Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts, went one step further, suggesting that the research could have implications for the treatment of brain injuries or diseases.

"The results also support the idea that it might, one day, be possible to add new, fully functional neurons into existing brain circuitry to treat diseases of the nervous system," he said in a commentary on the research.

Shors and Gould found that in rats the newly generated neurons were essential for 'trace memory', in which animals learn to associate stimuli that are separated in time.

Shors and Gould gave male rats a drug that stopped the proliferation of new cells for several weeks and then tested them with various learning tasks.

"They couldn't learn the trace conditioning tasks which require the association of stimuli over time, but they could learn other tasks," Shors explained.

The researchers are trying to identify exactly what role the cells play in memory, and how sex differences influence memory and the generation of new neurons.

11:57 03-14-01

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Illustration of Brain Cells

Sat Jul 14