FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — A single injection, then a five-minute wait.
That's all it took for hundreds of stroke and traumatic brain injury patients nationwide to reverse years of debilitation. Now they're walking more steadily, reading more easily, concentrating better, speaking more clearly and regaining use of once-rigid limbs — long after giving up hope that their bodies would ever respond.
The 25-milligram shot at renewed independence is the brainchild of Boca Raton, Fla., physician Dr. Edward Tobinick. His patented method for delivering the anti-inflammatory medicine, etanercept, to the brain is getting praise around the world as a "radical breakthrough" in the treatment of chronic neurological dysfunction.
"It's magic," said Dr. Rene Alfaro, an ophthalmologist from Mexico, of the single-dose injection that almost instantly restored much of his wife's movement and cognition more than a year after an aneurysm and subsequent stroke incapacitated her left side. "It's like a click."
Within minutes of receiving the injection on Monday, Anna Alfaro walked without a cane, got up from a chair more easily and regained sensation in her left arm. Hours later, with some of her left eye vision returned, she could see the phone clearly enough to dial a number for the first time since her illness.
Her response is not unique.
In a peer-reviewed study in the Adis medical journal,
"CNS Drugs," Tobinick's Institute of Neurological Recovery gave etanercept injections from November 2010 to July 2012 to 617 stroke patients and 12 patients who had suffered a traumatic brain injury, or TBI....
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