Tag Archives: neural connections

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Three miraculous things happened last week in lives of patients!

First, I am treating a 14 month old girl who has never been able to crawl or walk. When she sits up, she is unstable and if she moves her head, she immediately falls over. She also has seizures and a genetic mitochondrial disorder. When I first examined her, one finding was that her left pupil was much larger than the right. When shining light into her left medial pupil, there was no response. A pupil is supposed to constrict with light.

After about 3 weeks of treatment, her pupil became the same size as the right side, but it still didn't respond directly to light. Then, last week, after the treatment, her pupil responded to light over and over again! There was a quantum leap in brain function that day!

Later that night, her mother called elated. She said her daughter was sitting up listening to music and bopping her head all around and was stable and wasn't falling over for the first time! Her husband also said that it seemed that his daughter was really paying attention to him in a way she hadn't before. Let's keep going and see if her seizures will be affected!

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A friend sent me this link today: Gene Therapy Makes Near-Blind Patients See by Strengthening Neural Connections

If you don't want to read the whole thing, I'll summarize the points I think are most important:

  1. "Gene therapy restored vision to blind patients by strengthening visual pathways from the retina, through the brain’s white matter, into the brain’s visual cortex...
  2. It doesn't matter how old you are, your brain can learn new things by making new pathways, by learning new things, etc.
  3. "The Ashtari study advances basic science knowledge on two fronts. “First, most of what we know about brain plasticity comes from animal studies. This research is extremely important, but clearly the human brain differs greatly from brains of experimental animals. "