Post by Lαrα on Jun 26, 2015 0:28:42 GMT -8
This has got to be the number one important question in everyone's mind when they realize they have Spinal Cord Injury. We often hear about the 2 year benchmark for recovery time and we have also heard of people gaining recovery later than this.
When I was in rehab, I can remember several high level 'Quads' who i became friends with who looked in a pretty bad way when they first came to the unit, I was amazed how some of them made quick recovery and over a period of 3/4 months they were walking without aids.
So why is there such a difference because of course, there are many more who do not recover or recover very little, so why is this so?
Well there are several factors, it depends on how much cell death there is initially, injury to the spinal cord causes inflammation and reduced blood flow and this kills cells. Immediately after the initial injury this is taking place and can continue to take place for several weeks.
The ideal would be that at this point something can be administered that would protect these cells at the point of injury....and this seems to be what scientists are working at finding an answer to.
His lab has found that increasing blood flow at the site of spinal cord injury leads to less severe injuries.
Other labs are testing drugs that might protect nerve cells from death after spinal cord injury. In rodents, administration of the drug minocycline to the site of a spinal injury preserved axons, prevented tissue loss, and led to significant gains in the ability to move and feel.
Even if nerves can be re grown, they would need to still get past the injury site and this is where there is another hurdle
But there is hope...
Even when researchers are able to stimulate the growth of injured axons, they often find they cannot get the axons to grow beyond the site of injury itself.
To promote this growth, Mark Tuszynski, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, added nerve cells and growth factors to the injury site and beyond.
By leaving behind a trail of bread crumbs to guide axons at points along the spinal cord, for the first time researchers witnessed "axons regenerating into and beyond an injury site," Tuszynski explains.
"What we know about spinal cord injury has dramatically increased in the last 40 years," says Guest. "The rate of acceleration of improvements in treating spinal cord injuries will continue in the next decades, and the outlook for such patients will only get better."
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