Last Friday night Houston Texas receiver Harry Williams sustained a spinal cord injury (SCI) during a game against the Dallas Cowboys leaving him temporarily paralyzed. Monday he underwent surgery to fuse two vertebrae in his spinal column, a procedure that will hopefully allow him to lead a normal life, but won’t put him back in the game.

Williams was only 26, an age that would have given him years more on the field had this accident not happened. An estimated 14 percent of SCIs are a direct result of a sports related injury. Considering that there is about ten thousand new SCIs a year, this is a fairly significant number.

Last year Kevin Everett with the Buffalo Bills football team was paralyzed during a game. He has since recovered his ability to move his arms and legs, but he will never play football again. His recovery from paralysis, along with Williams’, is a rare occurrence as most who experience paralysis stay paralyzed.

There are 31 pairs of nerves that spread out from the spinal cord into the arms, chest, legs and abdomen. The nerves that are in charge of upper body movement are in the upper portion of the spine, while the ones that control the legs are in the lower area. Not only are these nerves responsible for limb movement, they also control basic functions such as breathing and heart beat.

The National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research has reported that in 2006 there were 16 indirect deaths and only one fatality in football, and the death was caused by a SCI. In 2007 there were eight cervical cord injuries with incomplete recoveries. Six of these were at the high school level. The majority of the SCIs occurred in games with only two happening during practice.

Considering that in 2007 there were 1,800,000 football players, these statistics aren’t painting too bleak of a picture. While each injury or fatality is a reason for concern, innovative safety gear has greatly decreased the chance of experiencing an unrecoverable injury. We have neurosurgeons such as Richard C. Schneider to thank for the decrease in permanent spine and head injuries. He helped to develop the football helmets our players currently use which have directly influenced this decrease as documented in the National Football Head and Neck Injury Register.

As researchers come up with better and more intuitive protective gear, we will continue to see these traumatic injuries decrease. In the meantime, those who have had their lives irrevocably changed from a brain or spinal cord injury deserve our continued support.

The importance of the vehicle seat’s role in automobile accidents shouldn’t be overlooked, yet it often is. If you run an Internet search, you will find numerous stories on collapsed seat backs, faulty restraint systems and inadequate load bearing ability - all manufacturer-related issues that have contributed to injury or death in automobile crashes.

One area of concern that is overlooked more than most is that of wheelchairs used in lieu of standard seats in vehicles. For those with disabilities, the act of transferring from a wheelchair to a car seat is often difficult and thus prohibitive. Instead, they often choose to purchase a van or other vehicle with the capacity to hold a wheelchair. Either the back seats are removed or the front passenger seat is in order to create a space for the wheelchair.

Vehicles can be modified to allow room for the wheelchair and the addition of special restraints to offer protection in an accident. While these restraints are tested for strength and comfort, they don’t give the wheelchair the same protective properties as originally equipped manufactured seats would.

Keeping in mind that a stock seat is still no guarantee that the person riding in or near it will be safe in an accident, the idea of a wheelchair providing the same degree of protection is faulty. They simply aren’t built to act as car seats. They haven’t been created to withstand the load placed on them and the occupant during a wreck nor to optimize the protective abilities of the restraints.

A common cause of injury during an accident is seat back failure - when the seat is unable to bear the increased load from the force of the impact added to the weight of the occupant, causing it to collapse. The two most common types are either a failure of the seat to maintain an upright position and the deformation of the actual structure. This usually happens after a rear impact that propels the vehicle forward the person backwards, creating strain on the back of the seat. There have been thousands of life-altering traumatic brain injury (TBI) or spinal cord injury (SCI) cases from these failures.

Properly manufactured seats should be able to bear this additional load as well as prevent the occupant from coming into contact with the vehicle’s interior, but too often they don’t measure up.

Now picture a wheelchair encountering those same circumstances. This chair is designed for comfort, ease of transportation and maneuverability - not impact resistance. The Subcommittee on Wheelchairs and Transportation (SOWHAT) has been pushing for better wheelchair standards, ones that will protect a passenger during motor vehicle transportation. They call for an emphasis on “design requirements, test procedures, and performance criteria” that will provide the necessary stability, restraint and strength.

SOWHAT’s earlier efforts in the 1990s to have ANSI, the American National Standards Institute, approve WC-19-Wheelchairs Used as Seats in Motor Vehicles has been approved, but it does not address every issue or concern posed, most notably it does not cover protection from rear impacts or rollovers.

To find out how you can better protect yourself or the wheelchair user in your life, check out the Ride Safe online brochure. They provide step by step instructions on how to best secure a wheelchair and its occupant while in a motor vehicle. They also list tips for selecting a wheelchair and tiedown equipment.

We are always looking for new developments that can lead to spinal cord injury (SCI) recovery and press releases like this one are a great incentive to keep looking.

The PLoS Medicine site reports that researchers studying spinal cord injuries in mice found that chondroitin sulfate proteoglycan (CSPG) is needed for the repair of the neurons that will facilitate the regaining of movement, but after time, it actually hinders a full nervous system recovery. In studies on mice, the researchers allowed CSPG to act uninhibited for two days after the injury before interfering and by doing this, created a promising response in the animals.

Heavily secreted after an injury, CSPG helps to form glial scars after a SCI. These scars protect the damaged areas, but they also release chemicals that work to prevent further regeneration in the nervous system. Because of its link to preventing axonal development, researchers were focused on eliminating CSPG from the injured area.

This compounded data suggests that eliminating CSPG may not be the best answer, and scientists are opting instead to control it. CSPG has a place in the healing process as it regulates the local immune response which is vital for proper healing.

So far studies only extend to animals, not humans, but there are similar enough correlations between spinal cord repair processes that it’s believed this research can soon be applied to human subjects.

To read the original release, please click here.

Q: What spinal cord injuries occur most in sports?

A: There are two types of spinal cord related injuries that occur most frequently in sports. The first is called a stinger or burner and the second is transient quadreplegia. While they can happen in almost any sport, they are most commonly found in contact activities such as wresting, rugby and football.

Stingers are a painful nerve injury created by compression in the neck or shoulder area that creates a sharp stinging or burning sensation in an arm. Transient quadriplegia typically results from hyperextension of the neck coupled with cervical spinal stenosis or disc protrusion.

The aptly named stingers affect close to 50 percent of those in contact sports, while the more debilitating transient quadriplegia occurs in roughly 1.3 athletes out of 10,000. Overall, spinal cord injuries are decreasing as better equipment is created and worn.

Indevus Pharmaceuticals has received a United States patent for it’s overactive bladder treatment, the drug Sanctura XR. Good until January 2025, this once-a-day treatment is, according to Indevus’s Website, the only approved quaternary amine compound for the treatment of overactive bladder.

This compound can relax the smooth muscle tissue in the bladder, decreasing the contractions that lead to over activity. As many spinal cord injury (SCI) patients know first hand, they are particularly prone to developing an overactive bladder due to the nerve pathways between the bladder and brain becoming interrupted.

With the use of dugs such as Sanctura XR, patients are hopefully able to avoid painful surgeries and extended recovery periods. Of course, as with all drugs, the degree of benefit depends on its interaction with each individual patient. We aren’t advocating for this particular drug, only sharing your latest options!

If you’d like more information, click here.

This week’s fact (or rather, facts) comes from the Care Cure Community’s Dr. Wise Young in response to the spinal cord injury question, “What can I do now to be ready for the cure?”

“The first and foremost concern of people with spinal cord injury should be to take care of their body and try to prevent muscle and bone atrophy and other changes that may prevent recovery of function. This is difficult but people need to engage in disciplined exercise that maintains their muscle and bone, take care of their skin, bladder, and bowels.

People should avoid procedures that cause irreversible loss of peripheral nerve and other functions. On the other hand, it is important to weigh the benefits of procedures such as tendon transfers which can provide greater functionality and independence for people with weak hands. Likewise, certain procedures such as Mitrofanoff and bladder augmentation to reduce bladder spasticity may provide greater independence but may not be easily reversible.

Finally, many studies have shown that people with the highest levels of education after injury are more likely to have better quality of life and health. It is important that people do not neglect their brain, the most important part of their body.”

Dr. Wise Young is the founding director of the W.M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience and a professor at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He is recognized as one of the world’s top neuroscientists.

Have you felt like you or someone else you know with a disability has been the victim of a hate crime? We will admit that this isn’t a subject that we knew much about before coming across a BBC article discussing the issue.

“Last year, Christine Lakinski - a woman in her 50s with learning and physical disabilities - had collapsed in the street near her home in Harlepool when she was set upon by a neighbour. She was covered in shaving foam, urinated upon and filmed on a mobile phone as she lay dying.”

This horrendous account started us thinking about the issue - if there is actually an issue with disabled hate crimes.

According to the same BBC article, there have been multiple deaths where the assailed was either physically or mentally disabled, or a combination of the two. The question asked seems to be - where does the title “hate crime” come into play?

If you are picking on someone who is different from you, is it a matter of “hate” or is it just a form of bullying? When someone is either physically or mentally hurt from the actions of another, does it matter what the label is? According to the law, there is a significant difference.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation defines a hate crime as “a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias. For the purposes of collecting statistics, Congress has defined a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.” Hate itself is not a crime—and the FBI is mindful of protecting freedom of speech and other civil liberties.”

Interestingly enough, “federal statutes prevent the FBI from investigating crimes of bias motivated solely by … disability” as this is primarily the domain of the local law enforcement. Because hate crimes are often a blurry area, they tend to get prosecuted as arson, murder or intimidation. For disability specifically, the majority of crimes usually fall under Title 42 - Criminal Interference with Right to Fair Housing. This statute focuses on preventing intimidation, interference or injury in regards to a person’s housing rights.

This makes sense when you consider the amount of disabled people who are unable to care for themselves physically and are dependent on either paid or non-paid companions to assert their rights. But what about those who are harassed outside of a housing situation?

The Criminal Justice Act of 2003 labels a hate crime as an “offense motived by hatred or prejudice towards a person because of their actual or perceived disability. It is also a criminal offense in which immediately before, after or during the offense the perpetrator demonstrates hostility towards a person because of their actual or perceived disability.”

So what does all this mean? People with a disability are protected from hate crimes or anything that can be construed as a hate crime by our legal system. The difficulty is not just in the justice system’s definition, but in what the person who encountered the situation considers the harassment, intimidation or abuse to be.

In our research we found multiple accounts of those who both supported the idea of a disabled hate crime and those who thought it was too strong or too general of a term. Where this becomes important is when the definition is imperative to categorizing acts against the disabled as hate crimes in order to better protect them from abuse.

In the UK, surveyors found that the 68 recorded cases of disability hate crimes prosecuted between April and September 2007 fell far short of the number those surveyed had directly experienced. When it’s a matter of protecting and denouncing this sort of crime, it becomes vitally important to have them not only clearly defined, but to have a precedent to follow that will help prevent future occurrences.

Call it “harassment” or call it a hate crime; any degree of abuse towards a disabled person should be confronted immediately for what it is. And hopefully, with a greater awareness of this issue, more people will be willing to protect those who are physically or mentally unable to protect themselves.

A MedPage Today article references a study performed by Paul Little, M.D. at the University of Southampton that was reported in BMJ Online First that may be able to benefit those with chronic back pain, such as is often felt after a spinal cord injury (SCI).

The focus was on the Alexander technique, a one-on-one instruction method created to help individuals develop lifelong skills that will improve chronic back pain by looking at things that contribute to the pain, such as poor posture, and rectifying it.

With as little as six lessons in the Alexander technique of musculoskeletal use combined with exercise, patients were found to have significantly reduced chronic back pain long-term.

The measure of benefit used is the Roland disability score which measures how many activities a patient can do. The Alexander technique was found to improve the patients scores by three points, meaning an addition of three activities that were no longer limited by back pain

To learn more and see for yourself if this technique can help you, check out this Website.

Stem cell research is moving along at a fantastic pace these days, with non-controversial sources being discovered at a seemingly increasing rate.

An important development came to our attention on BrightSurf.com’s news site. Dr. Noboru Sato, an assistant professor of biochemistry at UC Riverside, has created a way to grow human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), cells that can produce any type of adult cells in humans, without the use of animal-derived material.

Currently, the majority of researchers use animal-based materials for cell cultures, risking the transmission of viruses and pathogens to the growing hESCs. Sato has figured out how to use poly-D-lysine, a chemically synthesized extracellular matrix that the hESCs attach to, instead of the animal-derived Matrigel-coated culture plates typically in use now.

Not only is the poly-D-lysine cleaner, it is easier to work with and has a high rate of pluripotency, a term meaning that it helps hESCs with the ability to divide into specialized cells.

This study will appear online in the Aug. 20 issue of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) ONE.

Remember that feeling of invincibility that you had as a teenager? For most of us, that feeling is almost unrecognizable now that life has caught up with us and we are aware of just how delicate life can be.

Dr. Najma Ahmed, the assistant director of trauma at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada, says that this feeling of invincibility is preventable. “Teenage drivers have the highest rate of injury and death from motor vehicle crashes of any demographic group in Canada,” says the Canadian Press, and most of these teens are oblivious to their danger.

Dr. Ahmed says “It’s my job, our job to save them.” With a new program at St. Michael’s, she is hoping to do just that. A study of 260 adolescents found that when teens met with their peers who had sustained paralysis or another such life altering injury, they were most likely to alter their attitude and behavior in regards to taking the risk of damage or death seriously.

Dr. Ahmed is promoting the ThinkFirst Injury Prevention Strategy for Youth (TIPSY) at St. Michael’s, a program that takes teens to see first hand what can happen to them. Some of the situations included visiting young victims of accidents in the ICU unit, a situation that worked to bring the intended point home.

Researchers are hoping that programs such as this will spread as parents begin to realize the importance of prevention. Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) or spinal cord injuries (SCI) are just some of the life changing results of a teen driving too fast and losing control of their car.

With early education, such as is given through TIPSY, the researchers at St. Michael’s hope to greatly minimize these traumatic situations as more youth leave behind the idea that “it can’t happen to me”.