If you ask an ordinary person – specifically someone not involved in the field of neuroscience – what they believe is the key part of controlling your body, most people would answer your brain. Even I remember being a young kid and being so curious about how my brain works in controlling everything I do. However, often people neglect the participation of your spinal cord in essential functions of the human body. Your spinal cord is essential in carrying signals from your brain. Without it, there are no pathways to carry out essential motor and sensory signals. Spinal cord injuries(SCIs) thus can be so dangerous for our body because of the widespread harmful effects it can cause. Spinal cord injuries can vary from something as small as localized numbness to full body paralysis.
It can be an intimidating task to treat spinal cord injuries because of the complexities and, even in 2022, the information we still do not know about the spinal cord. Luckily, studies proposing treatments for spinal cord injuries are becoming more prevalent in the field. In 2020 researcher Dr. Oudega and colleagues explored how the injection of a nanofiber-hydrogel composite (NHC) can repair and regenerate neural tissue in damaged spinal cords of rats (Li et al. 2020). After injection, neural tissue at the injury site was shown to have increased in blood vessel density, present immature neurons, axon density, and normalized glial scar formation (Li et al. 2020). These results support that NHC repaired the contused neural tissue by successful regeneration. However since these results were done with rats, it has not been studied if the NHC injection would help SCIs in humans. It would be interesting to also study the effectiveness of the NHC injection using behavioral measures. For instance, depending on the severity of the SCI, studying how NHC injection improves mobility control of the body would be beneficial.
There have been other studies in the field that propose other mechanisms to repair SCIs and evaluate the success using behavior-based metrics. Bret Stetka published a paper in the Scientific American in which he discussed a new method of motor function repair in the spinal cord (Stetka 2022). This research has focused more on the effects of SCI patients with paralysis. This method targets dorsal nerve roots, which are nerve fibers that deliver sensory information to the spine. Sensory info delivery to the spinal cord is essential because it coordinates with our nervous system to then deliver motor information to our body. This was believed to be an effective method because after a SCI, a small amount of spinal cord nerves do survive, but because the tissue around them is dead or damaged, they become dormant since they receive no more stimulation (Stetka 2022). Thus, spinal stimulation can reawaken some of these few surviving spinal nerves. However, this method was limited because it requires long-term stimulation, it is mostly a short term fix. So in a clinical setting, patients with paralysis would need some sort of implant to give them continued stimulation of their damaged spinal nerves.
Both proposed treatments to SCIs show different ways SCIs can be treated. Even though both studies have their caveats, this shows we are making great advancements in the field of SCIs! The fact alone that we are able to provide short-term treatment, or regenerate neural tissue, shows that we are making the right steps to developing a long-term cure for paralysis and SCIs.
References
Li, X., Zhang, C., Haggerty, A. E., Yan, J., Lan, M., Seu, M., Yang, M., Marlow, M. M.,
Maldonado-Lasunción, I., Cho, B., Zhou, Z., Chen, L., Martin, R., Nitobe, Y., Yamane,
K., You, H., Reddy, S., Quan, D.-P., Oudega, M., & Mao, H.-Q. (2020). The effect of a
nanofiber-hydrogel composite on Neural Tissue Repair and regeneration in the contused
spinal cord. Biomaterials, 245, 119978.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biomaterials.2020.119978
Stetka, B. (2022, February 7). Spinal stimulation helps people with paralysis walk, canoe and
stand at a bar. Scientific American.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spinal-stimulation-helps-people-with-paralysi
s-walk-canoe-and-stand-at-a-bar/
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