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

I read 20 years ago...

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

That an injection of DMSO would halt swelling and stop nerve and brain damage in trama injuries.

As far as I know, nothing came of it, alledgedly because nobody wanted to do clinical trials since it couldn't be patented.

History repeating itself?

Re:I read 20 years ago...

[nido]

DMSO is wonderful stuff. I once took a divot out of my forehead (stood up into the corner of a cabinet door). I could feel the blood starting to pool up, so I went to look in a mirror. "Yeah, that's going to scar up nicely..." Fortunately I'd heard that DMSO can prevent scars from forming, so I poured some onto a cotton pad and put it on my forehead. It burned a little bit, but it slowed the bleeding down by 90%. Nice. If I look real close I can see a tiny scar. It could've been much worse.

DMSO takes stuff right through the skin. You can dissolve asprin in dmso and apply it topically, and that asprin will go right to where you need it. I did that for a while, but stopped when I realized I couldn't tell the difference between DMSO+Asprin and straight DMSO.

It was also shown to relieve pain and swelling, relax muscles, relieve arthritis, improve blood supply and slow the growth of bacteria. It relieves the pain of sprains and even of broken bones. It enhances the effectiveness of other pharmacological agents. If you apply DMSO to a bruise, the bruise dissolves and disappears in a matter of minutes! If you apply it to the jaw after wisdom tooth removal, all pain and swelling is prevented! The pain of acute gout can be handled with the application of 5 cc of seventy percent DMSO in water four times each day. Application to a fever blister results in rapid resolution of this problem. DMSO also relieves the pain of minor burns and if applied soon after the burn happens, will decrease the tissue damage suffered. DMSO speeds all healing, approximately doubling or tripling all healing responses.
- http://www.medical-library.net/sites/_dmso_dimethy lsulfoxide.html

I love DMSO, and in fact am about to break out a new bottle, 'cause I've spent too much time on this stupid laptop computer, and my shoulders and forearms are all inflammed. Bathe/dry off/apply/wait 10 minutes/rinse.

Everyone who's considering using DMSO thing should get a book on the topic, 'cause it's possible to do some stupid stuff. I know a guy who soaked a cotton pad in DMSO and put it on his foot with an ace bandage. His nerves were firing painfully for days... :).

cheap? not when it's made by glaxosmithklinemerk

[johnpaul191]

i am sure medical grade antifreeze will cost even more than injet ink....
kind of like how superglue can close wounds from razor sharp objects, but hostipal grade liquid bandage probably costs about $200/tube.

Another recent story on recovery from nerve damage

[F13]

The other day there was a Sciencedaily article on a guy who recoved from nerve damage after a liver transplant.

Although his problem was due to "a 20-year history of drinking more than 100g of alcohol per day who had end-stage liver disease and weakness in both legs."

Re:Safe?

[Muhammar]

PEG linker is attached to some injectable drugs to modify (prolong and delay) onset of their effect. PEG is also part of some IV formulations. I don't remember that safety of PEG would ever be a big concern. Besides, these patients with spinal injury have to take only one or few doses, it is not like they would be on it for lifetime.

A little discussion

[maximilln]

I didn't know that PEG had therapeutic uses. I've always seen it as a solid support for reagents used in chemical reactions. As a chemist, I like PEG because it's inert to a majority of chemical reactions and is insoluble in many common laboratory solvents.

In this study I imagine they're using a solubilized form of PEG. It's probably a lower polymeric weight and in a polar/protic solvent--probably aqueous.

There are a few parts of the article which struck me as questionable, though:

PEG is able to stop this cascade of injury by repairing initial membrane damage

I don't think PEG so much repairs anything as it insulates the cells from each other so that they can all repair themselves without the toxic necrosis products causing further harm. I imagine that PEG also helps to moderate pH and prevent further damage that way.

or by fusing two damaged cells together into a larger functional nerve cell.

That's a neat theory. I doubt it.

Significantly, the polymer is attracted only to damaged nerve cells and tissue when it's injected into the blood stream. It doesn't move into undamaged regions nearby.

That's another neat theory. The pharmaceutical industry would love to know how a molecule with no particular shape or form manages to distinguish between "good" and "bad" cells. I'd be interested to see where the authoring reporter received this idea. I doubt highly that this is from a study of "inject in arm, observe in spine". Most likely the injection site was very close to the damages area and the injected aliquot had a mass and volume low enough to make distribution arbitrarily interpretable.

Re:A little discussion

[Blittzed]

Yes, I used to work in plant science, focusing on salt tolerance work in particular. Although I didn't personally use PEG, I know from my readings that it is used in for some aspects of salinity and water relations. It is used for research into how plants deal with water deficit because it can be used to lower osmotic potential without causing toxic effects to cells. Using salts and other ionic compounds does also lower the potential, but it can have bad side effects. PEG allows water potential to be investigated without these side effects. I would be interested to find out the actual mechanism by which it interacts with nerve cells. Buffering does sound a likely effect.

Re:A little discussion

[Idarubicin]

In this study I imagine they're using a solubilized form of PEG. It's probably a lower polymeric weight and in a polar/protic solvent--probably aqueous.

Yeah, the solubility depends a lot on the molecular weight of their PEG. I've done a bit of work in drug development, and one of the techniques used to improve the solubility of certain very nonpolar drug candidates is to stick a nice, soluble PEG group on. As you say, it's well suited to work in aqueous systems--like blood.

That's a neat theory. I doubt it.

Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool, if it happened. I too am skeptical on further reflection. If you got cell fusion taking place, wouldn't it mostly be useless--and destructive--fusions between axons and Schwann cells, and that sort of thing? I can't look up their original paper because I'm not at work, but it looks like they were working with pets in a veterinary clinic setting. I presume that the pets' owners weren't keen on having the animals sacrificed to do histology, so I'm quite curious as to how they reached this interesting conclusion.

That's another neat theory. The pharmaceutical industry would love to know how a molecule with no particular shape or form manages to distinguish between "good" and "bad" cells.

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt here. It may be that the newspaper article's author was simplifying or got it plain wrong. There could be a significant change in the membranes of these damaged cells, rendering them more susceptible to a given concentration of PEG. A localized effect may in this case have been misinterpreted by someone (either the researcher or perhaps more likely the writer) as a localized delivery.

Then again, injury and inflammation will increase the permeability of nearby blood vessels. The localization wouldn't be due to any special property of the PEG; it could just be taking advantage of that preexisting physiological response.

Head Injury Too?

[0111 1110]

I wonder if this would work for head injuries too. the same problem occurs with cascading neural damage after the injury. I don't know if I'd be inclined to inject some PEG directly into my brain though. We seem to have a natural aversion to injecting anything into our brains.

God knows what I would have done if I had noticed this article before my accident. I wonder if I would have been crazy enough.

wrt head injuries it has been found that progesterone also provides some protective effect if administered within 48 hours of the injury. Of course, women have less need for this and typically recover better from head injuries. I wonder if this would be true for spinal cord injuries as well.

I wonder if this could be used to treat

[multiplexo]

neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), Parkinsonism or Huntington's Chorea. I recall reading somewhere that one of the reasons these diseases are so damaging is that as they kill neurons chemicals are released which cause further neuronal apoptosis in a chain reaction.