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When you die, most of the cells in your brain gradually become extinct. But some, according to a new study, will become extremely active, growing to new sizes for several hours after death.
It is morbid to think that your brain is becoming more active after you left, but the researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) behind the discovery emphasized in a press release that this does not mean that people are aware or that the so-called “zombie genes” that trigger this activity neural could do something as dramatic as waking up the dead.
Instead, the study, which was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, has important implications for the way neuroscientists study the brain – especially when these studies are based on samples of human tissue.
Specifically, the team found that glial cells – which are not directly linked to neural activity, but provide a support system for the brain – activated, swelled and even developed new appendages as soon as the other cells around them died.
“The increase in glial cells after death is not very surprising, as they are inflammatory and their job is to clean things up after brain injuries such as oxygen deprivation or stroke,” co-author of the study, Dr. Jeffrey Loeb, head of neurology and rehabilitation of the UIC Faculty of Medicine, said in the statement.
This poses a certain problem for the field, because much of the research that scientists have done on neurological conditions, such as brain damage or Alzheimer’s disease, is carried out on brain tissue collected after death or surgery and operates under the assumption that brain cells they just die like everyone else, Loeb added.
“Our findings do not mean that we should discard human tissue research programs, it just means that researchers need to take these genetic and cellular changes into account and reduce the post-mortem interval as much as possible to reduce the magnitude of those changes,” said Loeb in the communicated. “The good news about our findings is that we now know which genes and cell types are stable, which degrade and which increase over time so that the results of postmortem brain studies can be better understood.”
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