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After a stroke, brain cells die and their connections to other parts of the brain are lost. Researchers believe that undamaged brain cells in other brain regions can potentially establish new connections to those areas that have lost their normal inputs, and that this 'rewiring' could result in a limited amount of spontaneous recovery after a stroke.

In the study, inosine was shown to stimulate nerve cells in undamaged parts of the brain to grow new connections into brain areas that had lost their normal connections as a result of a stroke. This 'rewiring' partially compensated for the loss of the original connections, and resulted in significant improvement in several types of behavior compared to rats that did not receive inosine.

'These findings are of both scientific and clinical interest,' said Larry Benowitz, PhD, director de Laboratories for Neuroscience Research at Children's Hospital Boston, and the principal investigator of the study. 'The study shows that inosine induces a great deal of rewiring in the brain after stroke. This rewiring is apparently sufficient to promote substantial functional recovery. In terms of clinical implications, inosine, which appears to have no apparent side effects in animals thus far, has potential as a novel nerve regeneration approach to treatment of stroke and other types of brain injuries.'

Inosine dramatically improved rats' performance on several behavioral tasks, including reaching for food in a tray outside their cages, placing their paws on a table top as they approached it, and controlling the movement of the paws while swimming. By the fourth week of the study, with their unaffected paw restrained, half of the inosine-treated rats used their stroke-affected paws to reach for food, compared to none of the untreated rats with strokes. Moreover, when inosine-treated rats were allowed to reach with either paw, 20 percent continued to use the paw affected by stroke. This has never been seen after stroke in any previous study, according to collaborating author, Bryan Kolb, Ph.D., an authority on cortical functions in rats, at the University of Lethbridge (Canada). In humans, strokes similar to the ones in the study cause long-lasting, and often permanent losses in movement and sensation.