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Reviewed By: Laura Martin,
SOURCES: 2007 Medical Reference from Medstar Television. Donald Stein, PhD, Neurobiologist, Emory School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA.
© 1999-2011 Medstar Television
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.
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.
Robert credits the drug progesterone for his remarkable recovery. As part of a clinical trial, he was injected almost immediately and repeatedly through an i-v 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.
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. 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.
Researchers hope to get the same results in a bigger clinical trial. The hope is progesterone can become a general purpose treatment for all brain trauma. For Webmd, I'm Damon Meharg .
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