Slashdot Mirror
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).
Yes, but, does it work if you are paralyzed from the neck up?
Unknown host pong.
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?
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
...and we now sadly bid adieu to the doggy hind-leg cart.
and now back to the fallout shelter...
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.
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."
Well, in all fairness, there is a reason for that, to a degree. Medical stuff has to be very, very, very sanitary.
TODO: Something witty here...
... besides eating and burrowing under the covers in one's bed.
(I'd wish they had tried this on my Roxy when she blew a disk a couple of years back.)
Don't let yourself be confused. Its not "medical grade antifreeze." That, and stuff you inject into yourself damn well should have higher standards than antifreeze for your car.
Material Safety Data Sheet
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
confused polyethylene glycol with ethylene glycol and wondered what they were doing injecting antifreeze into dogs (and wouldn't it be easier to put it in their water dish?)
Karma: Negative (Mostly affected by dorm trolling)
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.
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
Does that mean we'll have to refer to these recovered dogs as PEG-legs?
A bit of googling turned up the following:
DMSO
William T. Jarvis, Ph.D.
DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide) is derived from lignin, the binding substance of trees. The Crown Zellerbach Corporation, a mammoth lumber company, holds a number of patents on DMSO for use as an industrial solvent or liniment for treating pain in horses. Crown Zellerbach licenses DMSO exclusively to Research Industries of Salt Lake City for marketing as a drug called Rimso-50. Topically-applied DMSO has the unusual ability to act as a "chemical hypodermic needle" which is to say that it is rapidly absorbed through the skin and can take with it other substances that ordinarily would not cross the skin's barrier. Topically-applied DMSO produces a garlic-like taste in the mouth and a breath odor. Topical use can cause a rash, blistering, itching, hives, and skin thickening. Intravenous use can cause kidney damage and other adverse side effects.
DMSO was approved by the FDA in 1978 for only one purpose, the treatment of a rare bladder disorder, interstitial cystitis. However, scandal surrounded the FDA's approval of DMSO and some still believe that a cloud hangs over it. Stanley Jacob, MD, served as an supposedly unbiased medical monitor of DMSO between 1974 and 1979, but for three of those years (1974, 1978, and 1979), he was on the Research Industries board of directors. In addition to getting consulting and director's fees, Jacob is said to have bought 50,000 shares of the company's stocks. The medical officer charged with reviewing data from clinical trials of DMSO, K.C. Pani, accepted $36,500 in gratuities from Dr. Jacob during the time. A detailed account of the dubious FDA approval of DMSO is provided by Howard Rosenberg in "The DMSO Affair." [1 ]
DMSO became a darling among the promoters of quackery after CBS-TV's 60 Minutes portrayed the substance as a medical breakthrough [2]. Some arthritis sufferers testified that DMSO had provided relief. The Arthritis Foundation says that DMSO can act as a liniment with a counter-irritating effect temporarily relieving pain, but it does not reduce inflammation as do truly effective arthritis remedies (Arthritis Foundation, undated). A detailed Public Information Memo was issued to the Chapter Executive Directors of the Arthritis Foundation on November 13, 1981, following the publication of a popular trade book.
Mildred Miller, owner/administrator of the Degenerative Disease Medical Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, promoted DMSO for a variety of disorders including arthritis, mental illness, emphysema, and cancer. Miller wrote a book touting DMSO entitled A Little Dab Will Do Ya! (Quality Advertising, 1981). Miller also published Preventive Health News, a tabloid-sized newsletter in which she promoted DMSO and carried on a harangue against the establishment (Miller published another book with the disrespectful title Up Yours FDA). Miller was eventually convicted of Medicare fraud and went to prison [2]. The American Cancer Society issued a statement advising against the use of DMSO for cancer [3].
During its heyday, black market DMSO could be purchased in health food stores, military surplus stores, hardware stores, at swap meet booths, or even from vendors working out of the trunks of their cars parked along highways. Very often black market DMSO is industrial grade, not medical grade. A problem with industrial grade DMSO is that companies bottling the substance as an industrial solvent use the same equipment to bottle other substances. Residual toxic materials can contaminate industrial grade DMSO and may be taken into the body by DMSO's action as a "chemical hypodermic."
Because of DMSO's dangers and legal status, the FDA has had a running battle with DMSO distributors. In 1980, the agency discussed the controversy surrounding the drug in the FDA Consumer [4]. In 1982, the agency reported on actions taken against companies distributing DMSO in the Pacific Northwest [5]. A book touting DMSO, The Persecuted Drug: The Story of DMSO, by Pat McGrady became the
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.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
Here is the abstract of the article:
Lavert, PH et al. A Preliminary Study of Intravenous Surfactants in Paraplegic Dogs: Polymer Therapy in Canine Clinical SCI. Journal of Neurotrauma. December 2004, Vol. 21, No. 12, Pages 1767-1777
Hydrophilic polymers, both surfactants and triblock polymers, are known to seal defects in cell membranes. In previous experiments using laboratory animals, we have exploited this capability using polyethylene glycol (PEG) to repair spinal axons after severe, standardized spinal cord injury (SCI) in guinea pigs. Similar studies were conducted using a related co-polymer Poloxamer 188 (P 188). Here we carried out initial investigations of an intravenous application of PEG or P 188 (3500 Daltons, 30% w/w in saline; 2 mL/kg I.V. and 2 mL/kg body weight or 300 mL P 188 per kg, respectively) to neurologically complete cases of paraplegia in dogs. Our aim was to first determine if this is a clinically safe procedure in cases of severe naturally occurring SCI in dogs. Secondarily, we wanted to obtain preliminary evidence if this therapy could be of clinical benefit when compared to a larger number of similar, but historical, control cases. Strict entry criteria permitted recruitment of only neurologically complete paraplegic dogs into this study. Animals were treated by a combination of conventional and experimental techniques within 72 h of admission for spinal trauma secondary to acute, explosive disk herniation. Outcome measures consisted of measurements of voluntary ambulation, deep and superficial pain perception, conscious proprioception in hindlimbs, and evoked potentials (somatosensory evoked potentials [SSEP]). We determined that polymer injection is a safe adjunct to the conventional management of severe neurological injury in dogs. We did not observe any unacceptable clinical response to polymer injection; there were no deaths, nor any other problem arising from, or associated with, the procedures. Outcome measures over the 68-week trial were improved by polymer injection when compared to historical cases. This recovery was unexpectedly rapid compared to these comparator groups. The results of this pilot trial provides evidence consistent with the notion that the injection of inorganic polymers in acute neurotrauma may be a simple and useful intervention during the acute phase of the injury.
Eponymous Mallard. "It it quacks like a duck, it may be the Eponymous Mallard."