Environmental Enrichment can prevent brain injury after a stroke

From a paper published in Dec. 2022 in the Journal: Molecular Biology Reports

Citation: hen, XY., Han, Y., Gao, ZK. et al. Pre exposure to enriched environment alleviates brain injury after ischemia-reperfusion by inhibiting p38MAPK/STAT1 pathway. Mol Biol Rep(2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11033-022-08184-5

According to the CDC, more than 795,000 people in the US have a stroke every year. 3/4 of them (610,000) are first-time strokes. About 1 in 4 (185,000) are in people who have had a previous stroke. 87% of all strokes are ischemic strokes, in which blood flow to the brain is restricted or blocked.

Research already shows that Environmental Enrichment can help improve neurological dysfunction of patients after they had a stroke. in this paper, researchers wanted to see if Environmental Enrichment could also have a preventative effect and, if yes, how.

They conclude that indeed, “on the whole, [their] research demonstrated that EE pretreatment can have a protective effect on the organism” and that “EE can be one of the most promising means of disease prevention.”