MOSCOW, June 8. /TASS/. Researchers from Siberian Federal University (Krasnoyarsk) and a group of Russian scientists have developed a method for predicting the course of acute ischemic stroke by the composition of blood plasma, which will predict the nature and timing of a patient's rehabilitation, the university’s press service told TASS on Monday.
The authors of the study studied the blood plasma of 56 patients with acute ischemic stroke. It turned out that patients whose blood had high concentration of two types of proteins on certain days of the acute phase of the disease recovered more slowly and harder. These proteins (neurotrophic factor of the brain (BDNF) and vasculoendothelial growth factor (VEGF) are responsible for the development of small peripheral vessels — an extremely important process during a stroke, when the body must grow new vessels to replace the affected ones to restore the blood supply system.
"A group of scientists has developed a simple, reliable and minimally invasive method for dynamically assessing the clinical course of acute ischemic stroke and predicting the results of a patient's recovery. According to key findings, in case of an acute stroke, it is important to observe the increase and decrease in the level of BDNF in the blood plasma on the first, seventh and 21st days. In addition, a certain concentration of VEGF on the first and seventh days from the onset of ischemic stroke with a high probability indicates a more severe course of the disease," the press service of Siberian Federal University told TASS.
The authors also noticed that the group of study participants, in whose blood the VEGF and BDNF indicators increased intermittently on the seventh day of illness, had the highest mortality rate. This led scientists to the conclusion that mechanisms for successful restoration of blood vessels suggest a smooth increase in protein levels. To analyze the data the authors used the bioinfomatic method of elastic maps, which allows visualization of multidimensional data.
“This is a paradox as growth factors themselves are considered useful for the restoration of the circulatory system. Apparently, the secret here lies in a sharp increase in the number of these substances, and in this case 'more' does not mean 'better'. The elastic card method is universal and, as it turned out, quite effective for use in medicine. <...> We processed the data that my colleagues collected over the course of two years in such a way that we got another tool for predicting the long-term effects of ischemic stroke," said Mikhail Sadovsky, a professor at the Department of Biophysics and a senior researcher at Siberian Federal University as quoted by the university’s press service.
The study also involved staff and students from the Krasnoyarsk State Medical University and the Krasnoyarsk Interdistrict Clinical Hospital № 20, as well as the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Computational Modeling. The results are published in Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering.