Optimization of Progesterone may be good for treating brain injury
According to two abstracts highlighting Emory research on the hormone were presented at the 2009 Society for Neuroscience (SFN) meeting in Chicago, Progesterone can be highly effective for treating patients suffering from traumatic brain injury and is therefore tested for optimization.
This trial was developed by Donald Stein, PhD, Asa G. Candler Professor of Emergency Medicine at Emory School of Medicine.
From Sciencedaily.com:
One of the SFN abstracts reports on progesterone analogues that are more water-soluble. This work comes from Stein and his colleagues in collaboration with the laboratory of Dennis Liotta, PhD, Emory professor of chemistry.
Currently, the lack of water solubility limits delivery of progesterone, in that the hormone must be prepared hours ahead and cannot be kept at room temperature. Small chemical modifications may allow similar compounds with the same effects as progesterone to be given to patients closer to the time of injury.
According to the results, two compounds similar to progesterone showed an equivalent ability to reduce brain swelling in an animal model of traumatic brain injury.
The second abstract describes evidence that adding vitamin D to progesterone enhances the hormone’s effectiveness when applied to neurons under stress in the laboratory. Like progesterone, vitamin D is a steroid hormone that is inexpensive, has good safety properties and acts on many different biochemical pathways.
It was noted by the authors that a small amount of Vitamin D may improve the ability of progesterone to guard neurons from excito-toxicity, biggest cause of brain injury and cell death.
Tags: brain injury, progesterone, steroid, vitamin D
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