Blood vessels in the brain.COURTESY OF WILLIAM SONNTAG
Whole brain radiation therapy, which is used to destroy metastatic or hard-to-reach brain tumors, comes with a cost: brain tissue damage and the loss of some cognitive abilities. But publishing today (January 18) in PLoS ONE, researchers found that, after irradiating the healthy brain tissue of mice, reducing the amount of oxygen in their environment helped them regain the ability to perform spatial reasoning tasks.
“I believe this paper provides a first important step” in understanding how radiation affects the brain, neuroscientist Gabriel Haddad from the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the research, wrote in an email to The Scientist. “But we will need to really know how hypoxia is rescuing the phenotype before this could be at all translational,” ...
