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New Treatment Helps Cure Spinal Injuries
wap writes "Researchers have found that an injection of polyethylene glycol (PEG) into the site of neural injury was very effective in saving neurons in dogs, allowing them to recover their movement after the injury. This is an amazing development. PEG is a simple, safe chemical. Using it as a post-injury treatment could prevent paralysis in thousands of accident victims every year, if hospitals start using it. This doesn't mean we don't need stem cell research, but it is a simple and potentially cheap way to get many of the benefits for spinal injury."
I wasn't aware that PEG was safe. Don't you use that stuff punch holes in cellular membranes? Like when making hybridomas (antibody-producing cells used in research).
...to cure Superman!
This doesn't mean we don't need stem cell research, but it is a simple and potentially cheap way to get many of the benefits for spinal injury.
Christ, why does everyone feel the need to stick in their two cents about some marginally-related issue? Must everyone try to link every article they submit to some kind of larger issue? I'm starting to think Jon Katz is submitting all these articles under pseudonyms.
this is also to be given right after the accident.... the stem cell work is for people with conditions that have set in, let alone all the other possibilities.
A while ago, literally about a dozen papers would come out each month professing some miraculous breakthrough in the field. Usually all pretty well done, almost always in big peer-review journals. Very few of these methods have been followed through to clinical trials. The skeptic in me says it's because, as you said, there wasn't always a clear way to profit from it.
My even-more-skeptical side says that a lot of these results get fudged quite a bit because, thanks to recent attention paid to Christopher Reeve/stem cells et al, there's a lot of money floating around and many opportunities for researchers to make a name for themselves. That's why they never pan out -- they don't work.
This isn't to discredit anyone working in academic sciences, almost all of whom are grossly overworked and underpaid. However, the trend in NSF funding in the last five years has been to limit the number of researchers receiving grants, and dole out much larger grants to those few promising studies. It creates very cutthroat competition, forces researchers to overhype their studies, and ultimately causes a lot of scientific dead ends. Worst of all, it gives a lot of false hope to people suffering from a number of injuries/diseases that a cure is just around the corner (as long as you write your congressman to give us more money).
It's really quite sick, and was one of the reasons why I left the field.
Well that and there might be all kinds of random chemicals mixed in with the antifreeze. I prefer my medical supplies to be free of lead, benzene and other potentially toxic chemicals.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
There isn't really a "larger issue" here; spinal injuries are one of the most immediately promising applications of stem cell research, and there was an article just like a week or something ago here about curing certain spinal injuries in rats by injecting cordal stem cells.
Since stem cells are currently in the news as a directly competing potential technique for doing the exact same thing the technique in this article does, it seems mentioning them here is both reasonable and germane. If nothing else I think that saying that new experimental spinal cord research techniques are only "marginally related" to new experimental spinal cord research techniques is perhaps not quite fair.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
IIRC when I first saw this study (the article makes only oblique reference) PEG can be given via IV. This should be studied in the prehospital setting, so that eventually, we won't think of it as a "hospital" thing, but as a prehospital treatment modality by EMT-Intermediates and Paramedics (after all, you don't hurt your cervical spine at the hospital, you do it in the car wreck, or in that fall, or in that shallow dive...)
instead of clarifying adult or embryonic
So you complain about somebody injecting political debate into a medical debate by bringing up medical research in an article about medical research, then demand that they should have injected political debate into it by specifying whether they were discussing the kind you (apparently) consider "bad"?
Whatever. Scientific advancement only comes from pushing the boundaries of what we know. You can either allow science to advance by allowing them to push the boundaries of what we know in the area of stem cell research, or not. Period. You can try to push some imaginary arbitrary distinctions somewhere but in the medical sphere all it comes down to is are researchers going to be allowed to do their jobs, or not?
The problem with stem cell research is that it has been so politicized, partly by the people who object to "'Republican's bad' crap" as you call it. A rehabilitative technique such as this, which is very feasible and makes use of already-available source content and can potentially help a great deal of people needs to be researched; that is the whole purpose of science. The problem is when people step in and inject politics into such an issue. If you don't like stem cell research, let's see some studies showing that it's not going to be useful and the research is a waste of money, or some indication that it would require an abandonment of medical/scientific ethics (besides the assertion that a tiny cell has a soul, which you can think if you wish but this has no place in science). And the "adult or embryonic" difference- most people who aren't fans of paralysis just don't care.
What's wrong with using placental stem cells?
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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.