Here is promising new information for the treatment of brain injuries, stroke, neurological abnormalities. Turns out, progesterone plays a major factor in functionality, repair, and protection of brain tissue.

“The key thing that I want to stress is that progesterone does a lot of things at the [structural] level to help rescue neurons that might otherwise die as a result of the trauma,” Dr. Stein says. “Progesterone is involved in many different processes that help to repair and reorganize damaged brain tissue, and that’s why I think it’s so effective.”

Compared with other experimental treatments for traumatic brain injury, progesterone offers a number of advantages: it is lipid-soluble and quickly crosses the blood-brain barrier to allow rapid onset of action; it has a long history of safe use in both men and in women; and it can be given intravenously through an injection site in the arm or leg.8 Its effects on a variety of receptors in different locations allow a host of neuroprotective actions.

“A lot of drugs have failed—the ProTECT II trial was the first successful trial for traumatic brain injury in 40 years,” Dr. Stein says. “And one of the reasons I think progesterone has worked is because it does not target just one specific receptor mechanism...”

...Progesterone is a powerful hormone that has been proven to confer profound neuroprotective effects that improve outcomes and reduce mortality following brain injuries. Donald Stein, PhD, has been at the forefront of testing progesterone and discovered that giving intravenous progesterone to male or female brain-injured rats reduces swelling in the brain and helps motor and functional recovery. In a clinical trial involving 100 human patients with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury, adding progesterone reduced the death rate by almost 60% compared with placebo.