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Scientists Restore Walking After Spinal Cord Injury
Spinal cord damage blocks the routes that the brain uses to send messages to the nerve cells that control walking. Until now, doctors believed that the only way for injured patients to walk again was to re-grow the long nerve highways that link the brain and base of the spinal cord. For the first time, a UCLA study shows that the central nervous system can reorganize itself and follow new pathways to restore the cellular communication required for movement. The lead researcher said, "This pessimistic view [that severe injury to the spinal cord means permanent paralysis] has changed over my lifetime, and our findings add to a growing body of research showing that the nervous system can reorganize after injury."
The entire population of paraplegic mice are rejoicing today in the hopes that this news pans out.
liqbase
An anecdote about nerve re-routing...
When I was 15, I had an accident (put my hand through a glass door, the glass cut through my wrist clean to the bone taking out all the tendons as well as the median nerve, that runs roughly up the middle of the front of the wrist and supplies the thumb, finger 2 and half of finger 3 and part of the palm with sensation).
To repair all the damage, it took 6.5 hours of microsurgery. The nerve took several months to fully regrow.
When it did, the sensation came out in all the wrong places - if I touched part of one finger, the sensation would come out somewhere else, for instance on another finger or somewhere more or less random in the affected area of the hand. But within a few months, the brain had "rerouted" everything, and the sensations gradually started coming out in the right place.
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Two of us fully-abled people would buddy with the disabled divers. We'd pull them around the ocean floor.
I found it quite an eye-opening experience.
One of the students was my quadriplegic friend Foster Anderson, who was injured in a motorcycle accident as a teenager. I haven't seen him for a while, but he used to commute from Santa Cruz to Silicon Valley in a special van to work as an engineer. He can just control his arms, but not his fingers.
I understand he once appeared on the cover of a surfing magazine, riding a surfboard.
I also read in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience that a study of Italian paraplegics found the unanimous opinion that becoming disabled was the best thing that ever happened to them: before their injuries, they failed to fully appreciate their lives. Afterwards they were able to live far more rich and rewarding lives, because they understood better just how precious the gift of life is.
Don't write off the disabled. They - we, rather, as I myself have a profoundly serious mental illness - are capable of far more than most of society gives us credit for.
Think of that next time you park illegally in a handicapped spot. (Foster saw someone do that at a restaurant once, and started repeatedly ramming the car with his electric wheelchair!)
Request your free CD of my piano music.
After a while, everything began to appear right-side-up to him when he wore the glasses, so much so that he was able to ride a motorcycle while wearing them!
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Killing us with hope? Great advances in medicine don't occur overnight. They are often long slogs taking decades infrequently punctuated by a breakthrough that may or may not lead to cures. HIV used to be regarded as a death sentence and just over twenty years ago many feared a pandemic. It is now, and has been for a few years, regarded by HIV clinicians as a long-term treatable disease. It still isn't cured and a cure is probably still quite far off, but people afflicted with it have hope for a normal life.
Don't underestimate the value of hope. While something as dramatic as Christopher Reeves getting up and walking didn't occur in reality, it is important that people know advances are being made. A cure may not be available in our lifetime but the hope for one encourages scientists to pursue the research, people to fund it and patients to hang in for the results.
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex.
Why
Even though the issue is of personal importance to me, I won't be holding my breath until a good solution comes out.
Brain interprets severed spine as censorship and routes around it :)
It's one more kid that'll never go to school
That'll never fall in love never get to be coooo-oool.
My girlfriend once was a professional skiier. She had an accident that left her in a wheelchair for two years. She has some form of paralasis where she cannot feel anything in her legs other than vibrations which travel up her bones. She learned how to walk by feeling the vibration of the floor under her feet. I don't quite understand all of it but it's really amazing. The only time she has problems with this though is on surfaces that absorb the vibration. Then she looks like she's drunk.
Actually, the scientists did not "restore walking" in the mice. The scientists only studied the mice while the mices' bodies restored walking.
God, this crap is irritating to read about... especially when half your body doesn't work because of problems like this. Here I am watching the last of my youth drain away with ideas I'll never see come to fruition, while they frustratingly dangle this damned carrot in my face.
Sure, I know there's risks involved in rushing into human testing in medicine, before a complete study on other animals has been completed. But, you know... some things are worth taking the extra risk for!
So how about offering up guinea pig slots for those of us with not much else left to lose?
8==8 Bones 8==8
Wow. It's pretty sick for you to immediately jump from the concept of loving parenting to the concept of child abuse.
The scientist didn't restore walking after spinal cord injury. The mice restored their own ability to walk by neural rerouting. The scientist just cut the nerves and waited to see what happened. If the scientists actually restored the ability to walk when it was otherwise unlikely to return on its own, then this would be a much bigger story. This story is just another interesting data point that the brain and nervous system are much more plastic than previously thought but we've known that for at least a decade.
"We are against abortion until the fetus grows up and murders someone, then the adult fetus should be aborted by hanging, firing squad, electrocution, or lethal injaction."
Support abortion of adults like all good pro-lifers
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
That's actually a fairly well-studied question. In lower organisms like worms and flies, the nerve map is totally hard-wired. Every neuron is born in a specific location and extends its axons along specific pathways to pre-determined targets. In mammals it's a bit more complicated. There are millions of neurons and billions of precise connections between them. Looked at from a pragmatic point of view, there simply aren't enough genes in the genome to encode all of that specificity directly. So the body generally uses an approach to making its proper connections that you can divide into a few basic phases: getting there, finding your partners, and fighting for survival.
"Getting there" is all about pathfinding. Instead of individual neurons, groups of neurons have molecular identities in that they express cell surface molecules that probe the environment and react to it by either growing towards attractive molecules or away from repulsive molecules. Different groups of neurons can respond in opposite ways (or not respond at all) to the same exact signal, allowing combinatorial groups of signals to be used to guide the groups of neurons in their intricate paths through the brain and body.
The specificity of the "finding your partners" phase varies depending on the system you're looking at. For some groups of neurons it's almost a free-for-all within the group, while other groups of neurons follow very specific patterns. In the visual system, for instance, the neurons in the eye project into the brain in what's called a topographic map. That is, neurons that are near to each other in the eye form connections that are near each other in the brain, allowing the relative orientation of the signals from the eye to be directly mapped onto the correct region of the brain. This is done with 2-dimensional gradients of cues in the targets and of the receptors for those cues in the neurons that allow growing axons to hone in on just the level of the signal that is correct for them and find their correct general area. (See Ephrin and Eph signaling in the eye for more info.)
Once connections have been established, the "fight for survival" begins. Since it's not guaranteed that the connections that the neurons form will be the correct ones, the body has to have some way of keeping only the connections that are correct and eliminating unwanted ones. It often does this by strengthening connections that are properly formed and able to stimulate target neurons at the proper times and weakening those that don't work well by a process called Hebbian competition. This allows the map to be fine-tuned once the general arrangement has been worked out. There is usually a "critical period" during which the map can easily undergo dynamic rearrangement in response to experience. After this time, however, the ability of the brain to rewire in response to experience decreases drastically and the map is fairly fixed. For example, if someone loses function in one eye as a young child, their other eye will take over much more than half of the visual system space in the brain, while this does not happen to anywhere near the same extent if it happens later in life. This is also the reason that children with strabismus (unaligned eyes) have to be treated very early in life in order to ensure that their visual maps from each eye are aligned. If they aren't treated within the critical period, their vision can never be fixed.
Anyway, didn't mean to write such a long post, but there it is in case anyone's interested. I just wanted to add that the article title and summary are fairly misleading. I haven't read the article in full, but even from the abstract it's clear that the scientists did not use any new techniques to "restore walking" in these mice. It's been known for a while that mice have a high incidence and rate of spontaneous recovery after spinal cord injury in the lab. That is, they are often able to regain function of their hindlimbs despite the fact that the injured axons themselves do not grow back