Acknowledgments This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health to P.T.R. (R01 NS084941) and to T.P.D. (R01 NS42652 and R01 DA11271). Introduction The blood–brain barrier (BBB) is an essential physical and biochemical barrier that separates the…
Introduction Cerebrovascular diseases cause tissue damage to both gray and white matter, which contribute about half of the CNS volume and differ in structure and cellular composition. White matter exclusively contains axons and their glial cell partners including fibrous astrocytes,…
Introduction Brain ischemia refers to a neurological condition that brain blood flow is insufficient to meet metabolic demand. There are two kinds of brain ischemia: (1) focal ischemia in which ischemia is confined to a specific region of the brain…
Introduction “Thus, when Heaven is about to confer a great office on any man, it first exercises his mind with suffering … it exposes his body to hunger … it stimulates his mind, hardens his nature, and supplies his incompetencies.”…
Introduction The effective delivery of pharmaceutical agents into the central nervous system (CNS) still represents a significant challenge to modern drug delivery. Much of this can be attributed to the presence of the blood–brain barrier (BBB), which consists of a…
Introduction The history of therapeutic hypothermia (HYPO) as a treatment for brain injury is quite a fascinating one. For millennia, cooling has been used to reduce edema and inflammation. Hippocrates recommended using ice packs on wounded soldiers. However, it was…
Introduction Few drugs have been developed to effectively rescue the patients with ischemic stroke in spite of the huge efforts to develop them for longer than 50 years . As alternative approach, cell therapy has recently been expected as one…
Introduction Research in the 1990s provided fundamental discoveries of the molecular mechanisms of apoptosis, one type of cell death. In the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans , the genetic control of the programmed cell death during development was elucidated . Cloning of…
Introduction Oxygen-free-radical-induced membrane lipid peroxidation (LP) is a highly validated secondary injury mechanism that occurs in focal and global cerebral ischemia and subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH). It has been firmly established as a major contributor to multiple aspects of ischemic, postischemic,…
Acknowledgments CP is the recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship granted by the regional council of Nord-Pas-De-Calais, France; and YTW is the holder of the Heart Stroke Foundation of British Columbia and Yukon Chair in Stroke Research. The authors also thank…