Efforts have been made by researchers in the quest to optimize the effectiveness of the hormone, progesterone, for treating traumatic brain injury.

As part of the efforts, two abstracts summarizing Emory research on the hormone were presented at the 2009 Society for Neuroscience (SFN) meeting in Chicago.

A multisite phase III clinical trial known as ProTECT III would be initiated to examine the effectiveness of the hormone in the next few months. This trial was developed by Donald Stein, PhD, Asa G. Candler Professor of Emergency Medicine at Emory School of Medicine.

From Sciencedaily.com:

One of the SFN abstracts reports on progesterone analogues that are more water-soluble. This work comes from Stein and his colleagues in collaboration with the laboratory of Dennis Liotta, PhD, Emory professor of chemistry.

Currently, the lack of water solubility limits delivery of progesterone, in that the hormone must be prepared hours ahead and cannot be kept at room temperature. Small chemical modifications may allow similar compounds with the same effects as progesterone to be given to patients closer to the time of injury.

According to the results, two compounds similar to progesterone showed an equivalent ability to reduce brain swelling in an animal model of traumatic brain injury.

The second abstract describes evidence that adding vitamin D to progesterone enhances the hormone’s effectiveness when applied to neurons under stress in the laboratory. Like progesterone, vitamin D is a steroid hormone that is inexpensive, has good safety properties and acts on many different biochemical pathways.

The authors noted that a low volume of Vitamin D may boost ability of progesterone to protect neurons from excito-toxicity, which is a principal cause of brain injury and cell death.