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.

In a recent article on PhysOrg.com, MIT researchers are spotlighted for finding stem cells in the spinal cord that may be able to be pushed to turn into healing cells instead of scarring cells. This would help with the development of non-surgical treatments for spinal cord injuries (SCI).

The stem cells under consideration are called ependymal cells. On their own they are slow to proliferate and promote regeneration on their own, but when grown in a lab they have been found to restore some degree of function in paralyzed rodents and primates.

According to the article, the ependymal cells migrate to the injured area of the spine, producing a mass of scar-forming cells along with beneficial healing cells called oligodendrocytes. The oligodendrocytes produce myelin, a nerve coating of sorts that helps to insulate nerves, helping their function to improve.

If you want to read the original study, check out the July issue of PLoS Biology. The article is by Konstantinos Meletis.

Late last week the Allen Institute for Brain Science revealed its Allen Spinal Cord Atlas. The atlas is the world’s first genome-wide map of the mouse spinal cord. This information will give researchers immediate access to a wealth of free online data that can be applied to spinal cord injury treatment.

According to their press release, there is close to one-quarter of a million Americans who have suffered from a spinal cord injury. With this new map, researchers are able to study diseases and disorders in humans as we share 90 percent of the same genes as mice.

When complete, this atlas will contain an estimated 20,000 genes from both youth and adults. For more information, you can read the press release here.

From the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery comes an article by Keith Bridwell, MD, Paul Anderson, MD, Scott Boden, MD, Alexander Vaccaro, MD and Jeffery Wang, MD discussing the newest research related to spinal cord injury among other spine-related topics.

In particular, the authors focused on the importance and availability of “quality outcome measures” in relation to SCI. The quality of these outcome measures are crucial as they are what assess progress or lack thereof in SCI research. In a 2006 meeting, the SCI Meeting Measures Group convened to review and discuss applicable measures such as neuroimaging, as used to evaluate SCI.

Some of the highlights from this meeting include: Magnetic resonance imaging is still the best test to find the degree of a spinal injury as well as the amount of compression; Pain is not only one of the most common problems experienced by SCI patients, but one of the most debilitating hence the need for a proper measure of pain is critical to furthering pain management research.

In addition, the authors sum up the 2007 ASIA meeting that evaluated psychosocial and quality-of-life issues for SCI patients. They found that withing in three years of their post-injury rehabilitation, only 21 percent of patients returned to work. The majority of these were college educated and worked in a field that didn’t require manual labor, (not a surprise!). What the authors found particularly important about this study was that it pointed to the need for counseling those who are accustomed to manual labor and/or have a low amount of education.

An interesting finding was that those who had a higher level of education were more often married, employed, active in the community and generally more satisfied with their lives.

At the ASIA meeting, various studies on emerging therapies were also presented. The majority of the emphasis was on post-injury therapy in the form of locomotive training. This is where the patient is suspended over a moving treadmill in order to stimulate recovery due to the “repetitive sensory experience of walking”. There have been a series of cases that show this therapy to be beneficial for recovery, which makes it worth looking into by us non-scientist types.

While the authors of this article only devote a portion of the total to SCI, there is some very good information that is worth looking at. For the whole story, click here.