A newly discovered biological signal in the blood could help health care teams and researchers better understand how children respond to brain injuries at the cellular level, according to our research in the Journal of Neurotrauma. As part of our work as a nurse scientist and neuropsychologist studying traumatic brain injury, we wanted to look for biological markers inside cells that might help explain why some children recover smoothly after brain injury while others struggle. While your DNA generally stays the same throughout your life, it can sometimes collect small chemical changes called epigenetic modifications. These changes act like dimmer switches, turning genes up or down without changing the underlying code. In general, dialing up the activity of a gene increases production of the protein it codes for, while dialing down the gene decreases production of that protein. One common type of epigenetic modification is called DNA methylation. DNA methylation is not fixed but can...
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