BBC Radio Scotland Breakfast<\/a> that it was a “really easy decision” to agree to donate part of his brain matter.<\/p>\n“I was getting the craniotomy anyway so they could get the tumour, and to get to the tumour they have to drill a hole,” he said.<\/p>\n
“They also have to go through healthy brain tissue to get there so they will just take it while they are accessing the tumour.<\/p>\n
“I think they just took about half the size of my pinky and it hasn’t impacted me at all.”<\/p>\n
Since having surgery to remove as much of the tumour as possible, he has undergone chemotherapy and radiotherapy.<\/p>\n
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Aidan is now undergoing chemotherapy [Aidan McAllister]<\/p>\n
Contributing to research felt personal for the healthcare worker after his grandfather died from dementia in 2020.<\/p>\n
“My grandad, Thomas, was a big strong man.” Aidan said. “He was a miner and to watch him disappear because of the disease was quite hard.<\/p>\n
“We were really close \u2013 he lived just across the road and we saw each other every day.<\/p>\n
“His dementia became so severe that he didn’t know who he was or who we were.<\/p>\n
“It’s a really brutal disease.”<\/p>\n
‘Healthy brain tissue’<\/p>\n
The pioneering research Aidan donated his brain matter to has allowed scientists to show how a toxic form of a protein linked to Alzheimer’s can attach to and damage the connections between brain cells.<\/p>\n
The researchers hope the discovery will help identify medication that can prevent the loss of synapses – the vital connections that allow messages to flow between brain cells and support healthy brain function.<\/p>\n
Neurosurgeon Paul Brennan said: “During neurosurgery, there is always a small amount of healthy brain tissue that must be removed in order to reach, for example, a tumour and typically that tissue would be thrown away.<\/p>\n
“Our partnership with Claire and her team means we can package up that healthy, living tissue and send it to the lab for testing.<\/p>\n
“Even the tiniest piece contains thousands of cells, and we can learn a great deal from it.<\/p>\n
“Research of this type has been underway for some time, but this collaboration allows us to study living human brain tissue in a way that hasn’t routinely been possible before.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aidan’s grandfather died from dementia in 2020 [Aidan McAllister] A man with a terminal cancer diagnosis has donated…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":709629,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[257712,37650,257711,257710,103389,49,48,10237,84,257714,257713,257709],"class_list":["post-709628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-aidan-mcallister","tag-brain-cells","tag-brain-matter","tag-brain-tissue","tag-brain-tumour","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-dementia","tag-health","tag-healthy-brain","tag-healthy-brain-matter","tag-paul-brennan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=709628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709628\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/709629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=709628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=709628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=709628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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