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."

Comments

Safe?

[xanthines-R-yummy]

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).

Re:Safe?

[Psychofreak]

I'll take a temporary increased risk of a severe heart attack to sure death or paralysis. That may be just me, but I also plan to never have more nerve damage done than I already have. Not having full feeling in a few fingertips because of a drift-fence post is unpleasent, but tolerable (sliced through 2 fingers to the bone). Not having any ability to move on my own would be a fate worse than death I think.
Phil

Re:What not Stem Cells? Have we been lied to?

[johnpaul191]

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.

Bingo

[TheBurrito]

I worked in the spinal inury repair field for a number of years, and I think you've hit the nail right on the head. At least one of the nails.

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.

Uh, what?

[mcc]

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.