Cerebral Palsy
Professor Henrik Hagberg
Development of therapeutic strategies to combat cerebral palsy
There are 2.5 new cases of cerebral palsy (CP) per 1000 births in the UK, making it the commonest cause of serious childhood disability. CP is often caused by a combination of oxygen lack and impaired perfusion (=hypoxia-ischaemia) either in preterm infants or at term after severe birth asphyxia.
Brain injury develops with a certain delay after the insult, which opens up opportunities of therapeutic intervention after the insult and before the injury becomes irreversible. Indeed, our group at Imperial has shown that treatment after asphyxia in animals, and even in newborn babies, can reduce injury and improve outcome. These studies raise tremendous hope for the future but to make therapy more effective we need to understand much more about the fundamental mechanisms of cell death in the immature brain.
The power station of the cell – the mitochondrion – is centre stage in the decision of life and death particularly in the fetal/newborn brain. Mitochondria sense when the cell is in jeopardy and at a certain threshold level of stress, a suicide programme will be initiated leading to the opening of pores in the mitochondrial outer membrane and to release of proteins which kill the cell.
Our objective is to develop treatment that improves the state of mitochondria after injury and there by protect the brain.