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.

There are two new groundbreaking developments in paralysis and spinal cord research. These are peripheral nerve re-routing, and suppression of scar formation and spinal cord regeneration.

Peripheral Nerve Re-Routing

Peripheral nerve re-routing entails taking the peripheral nerves above the point of injury, and surgically rerouting them so they are connected to peripheral nerves below the injury site. This allows new functional connections between the brain and previously dormant muscle or sensory system to be created.

Peripheral nerve re-routing has been around for about 100 years, and has been attempted on hundreds of patients with spinal cord injuries. While peripheral nerve re-routing can’t completely cure a spinal cord injury, it can allow for various degrees of improvement. For example, patients with C1 to C4 injuries have experienced improved respiratory function following the procedure, while some arm and hand function has been returned to patients with C5 through C9 injuries. Patients with lower spinal cord injuries have, in some cases, seen improvement in leg function.

Suppression of Scar Formation and Spinal Cord Regeneration

This theory is based on the idea that traumatic spinal cord injury causes inflammation, as well as lack of a cell—called glia—where the nerve fibers are damaged. The result is the formation of a fibrous meshwork of dense scar tissue that prevents axons from regenerating. Suppression of scar formation and spinal cord regeneration is a two-pronged approach designed to reverse the process of scarring and promote the healing of nerve fibers.

During this procedure, scar tissue is suppressed or removed in order to promote axon growth across sites of the injury. Second, a therapy designed to restore glia, such as stem cell therapy, is used to regenerate the spinal cord. While studies in humans is still relatively new, studies on animals have shown significant promise.

With the increasing number of research programs focusing on stem cell research and their application to brain injury and spinal cord injury, today’s facts will help you understand why they are so useful.

Stem cells are basically blank cells that, in most cases, have the ability to become a variety of other cells. They are found in bone marrow, blood, the brain, skeletal muscle, fat and even the skin. While the main controversy exists over embryonic stem cells as they have the ability to become just about any cell, we are still able to utilize adult stem cells in a handful of useful ways.

The idea is that scientists can, with the right research, learn to program stem cells to become new spinal cord tissue or new brain tissue, repairing damage that right now, is irreversible. With more studies coming to light regarding the useful application of adult stem cells, we will hopefully see a day when researchers and anti-stem cell research advocates can find a common ground. In the meantime, keep reading. New applications are being discovered all the time!