A NEURON DIES AFTER UNDERGOING A TRAUMATIC INJURY. (COURTESY CHRISTIAN FRANCK)

A traumatic brain injury can cause neurons to shrivel up and die, but scientists are hopeful there’s a small window of time where treatment might be able to save some of those cells. Researchers examined neurons in petri dishes to see what exactly happens after a blow to the head. Here’s what lead researcher Christian Franck of Brown University told me about the work, published this morning in Scientific Reports.

What were you studying?

We wanted to understand, from a trauma perspective, how much is too much for these cells to take. When is their breaking point? And once they reach it, how long does it take for them to degenerate and die? The timeline from that initial trauma to cellular shut down is important to understand how much time one has to intervene therapeutically [after a brain injury].

How long did it take?

After six hours, you have biological events that’ve taken place that are irreversible. Cells shut down and cell death can’t be avoided. You know that you’ll have less time than that to do anything about it. There’s nothing you can do but hope the brain helps resolve itself.

Does that differ from one patient to the next?

The model we built is very simple. We only looked at neurons, but the brain has thousands of millions of cells involved. We didn’t look at that interplay. It’s important to note that what we built in the dish is not the brain.