Paraplegic Rats Enabled To "Walk" Again

eldavojohn notes a paper released in Nature Neuroscience today describing work in which paraplegic rats were enabled to walk again as early as a week after injury and treatment. The process involves a serotonin-influencing drug and electrical stimulation of the spine, along with an incentive to the paralyzed back legs to move — namely, being placed on a treadmill. Soon a poorly understood spinal mechanism called the "central pattern generator" kicks in and the rats' legs move under the stimulus of a rhythmic signal from the spine (the brain is not involved). Eurekalert reports, "Daily treadmill training over several weeks eventually enabled the rats to regain full weight-bearing walking, including backwards, sideways and at running speed. However, the injury still interrupted the brain's connection to the spinal cord-based rhythmic walking circuitry, leaving the rats unable to walk of their own accord."

Comments

Fatmouse.

[SanityInAnarchy]

I have nothing useful to add to this discussion, but this mouse could use a treadmill.

a try at a constructive reply

[pizzach]

That is usually code for "we severed the spine so we could test out this technique"

That is usually code for "I disapprove of this research and will continue to do so right up until I get a spinal cord injury, at which point I will promptly forget I was ever opposed to it and will gripe about the research taking too long."

You sir are no better than who you responded to because you pidgin-holed a large group of people by saying something obtuse. It edges on trolling (though I doubt you will me modded as such).

When market speak is pointed out in MS articles, those posts get an automatic +5 insightful. Though I am not sure that is exactly what this is in this case. I strongly think paraplegic was only used for brevity and because it has an exact medical meaning. It wouldn't surprise me if another page of the report detailed exactly how they made the rats paraplegic, perhaps even using the words that the poster that you were replying to wished they did.

I do hate it when people word things that they think some groups might find disgusting so that it is round about. It undermines transparency when you have to read into everything to figure out what it means exactly. It undermines allowing society to digest something and figure out where it falls in their "morality and ethics". We have a place for squashing flies. We have a place for the death penalty. We have a place for war. We have a place for hunting. We have a place for slaughtering cattle. I am sure there is a place for paraplegic mice, too.

Re:a try at a constructive reply

[pizzach]

It's important to remember that when reading about research on /., rarely are the summary or "the article" actually written by the scientists themselves. "TFA" is usually written by a staff writer at websites like newscientist, and the summaries are written by /.ers. Occasionally, a link is provided to the real paper, as it was here. That's the actual stuff straight from the horse's mouth. Before you critique the scientists for being incomplete or not including information, make sure you're reading the article that the scientists wrote to see if they did that, but the chain of people who brought it to slashdot left it out.

I said the exact same thing as you in your post....yet I got modded off topic and you got +5 insightful? WTF What I had written was below.

Though I am not sure that is exactly what this is in this case. I strongly think paraplegic was only used for brevity and because it has an exact medical meaning. It wouldn't surprise me if another page of the report detailed exactly how they made the rats paraplegic, perhaps even using the words that the poster that you were replying to wished they did.

Slashdot...disappoints me.