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Method To Repair Damaged Adult Nerves Discovered
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers have discovered a promising method to regrow damaged nerves in adults. Brain and spinal-cord injuries typically leave people with permanent impairment because the injured nerve fibers (axons) cannot regrow. A study from Harvard and Carleton University, published in the December 10 issue of the journal Neuron, shows that axons can regenerate vigorously in a mouse model when a gene that suppresses natural growth factors is deleted. Here is the journal article (subscription required to view more than the abstract)."
Of course I did not RTFA, nor am I trained in any sort of medical field - but I imagine that the possibilities that this might present are astounding. Are they hoping to restore mobility and function to people who have had major nerve damage as in the cases of spinal cord injuries? I thought stem cells were all the rage for that..is this a completely different approach?
Also - if we can stimulate the growth of nerve cells to help people, can the same therapy be used for nefarious stuff? (i.e., what happens if you grow too much nerves?)
Made me remember natural parenting. Hope it dont applies to this case too.
Tumors form through uncontrolled growth of cells. Axons are the connections between nerve cells that conduct the nerve impulses. There is no cell division proliferation going on here.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Sure, side effects of nerve growth unsuppression has to be studied. It may have implication in brain function disorders as well as elevated risks of tumors.or any other. By the way, this lead the path to further researches on proteins and other chemical treatments that may just temporarily inhibit that suppressor. Benefits risks ratio for a time restricted unsuppression could offer hope and an acceptable solution for nerve injured.
Léa Gris
Will this work for hearing? Abusing my ears with loud music and gun fire has resulted in some loss of hearing for me. Since I won't read the subscription article, does it say it works for all nerves or just the spinal stuff?
Sadly, this news is a little to late for Christopher Reeve...
Yes, but it'll be ready just in time for Worf's spinal injury...
Bow-ties are cool.
I would think that given the choice between a) curing oneself from being quadriplegic and increasing one's risk of cancer tremendously or b) staying quadriplegic and cancer-free, I think nearly everyone would choose the cure + cancer-risk route.
Stupid fucking autocorrect... Chiba City, you damn android.
Tumors form through uncontrolled growth of cells. Axons are the connections between nerve cells that conduct the nerve impulses. There is no cell division proliferation going on here.
That's true, the goal here is to let existing cells regrow their axons, not for cells to multiply - which is what cancer is a bad form of. So this might not directly be relevant to cancer.
However, there are plenty of other ways in which this could turn out to have side effects that make it a bad idea. One basic concern is that there is probably a reason why axon growth is supressed in the central nervous system - after all, the brain is amazingly complicated, and all those connections between brain cells need to be of the right kind. If things start connecting where they shouldn't, badness may occur. So just stopping the suppression might lead to too many connections being made.
But this is all speculation. Bottom line, this sounds like a breakthrough finding by the researchers, and one that will lead to a lot of followup investigation. Kudos to them.
It's one thing to regrow an axon in a petri dish. It's something else to regrow a 1m long axon inside a fully developed human body, and have it innervate the same muscle (for example) that the damaged axon connected to. It's not going to be a trivial challenge. This may have an impact in some traumatic injuries where the bundle can be reconnected before it's scarred shut or resorbed. For chronic conditions, this isn't going to have a direct impact in any near future. An exciting development nonetheless. Will have to follow the primary literature that comes from these authors.
First you got to migrate it it to humans.
There there several levels of testing before its even allowed ver much in humans in the US.
Sometimes things will be available abroad before the US if you are lucky. Some spine-damaged patients already try things in Israel and China based on stem cells. but not available in US.
"I can see doctors in India, China, and The Dominican Republic... "
If it's ever perfected, those may be the only affordable places for US citizens to get the treatment.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Its called "sending the kids to summer camp".
Have gnu, will travel.
As a paraplegic myself (with spina bifida), I'd say that it's not quite a slam dunk that I'd take the cancer risk. It depends on what the increased risk is. Being a paraplegic certainly isn't a roll in the park, but if I had to chose between that and taking a couple of years to die of cancer, I'd take a pass on the cancer. Of course, my willingness to have the treatment would be inversely proportional to that risk, but if the risk of cancer was increased "tremendously", that's not an acceptable risk (to me). I'm not sure how I'd feel about it if I was a quad, though.
The research out there on neural regrowth in adults is very interesting, because, yes, the classical empirical evidence is that damaged neurons go into apoptosis and are cleaned up by glial cells.
My girlfriend has atypical trigeminal neuralgia and underwent an unsuccessful microvascular decompression on the brainstem (wherein a venous structure was deconstructed and cauterized, a venule was padded with teflon, and a minor arteriole was resectioned and cauterized), followed by a more-successful partial sensory rhizotomy to resection the nerve in Meckel's cave via a 60% cut that ideally would hit most of the group-C fibers. The outcome of the rhizotomy is interesting, because it seemed to take care of the mandibular nerve pain while leading to a very odd outcome. In the vast, vast majority of partial sensory rhizotomies on cranial nerves (meaning more-or-less the ~99% who do not have the horrid-sounding outcome known as anaesthesia dolorosa), the loss of sensation eventually diminishes, as the nerve undergoes restructuring. There seems to be very little information in popular medical literature on the restructuring process, and as I don't have access to any specialized journals (for neurology, neurosurgery, etc.), I cannot find much information; however, it seems to perhaps involve rapid branching of the dendrites in parallel with apoptosis and glial clean-up of damaged neurons. In >90% of rhizotomies, there is little discomfort during this process. My girlfriend is one of the "lucky few" (and by that I mean that her neurosurgeons, Dr. Sekula and Dr. Jannetta, who himself pioneered microvascular decompression and other techniques for trigeminal neuralgia of both types and various types of hemifacial spasm, at Allegheny General Hospital, said they could not even remember the last time they had seen the effect she is experiencing) to have severe discomfort during the restructuring process. This discomfort is a dysthesia characterized by intense sensations of all types from the cranial nerve. She is experiencing sensations of pressure, nociception, touch, and proprioception in all branches of the trigeminal nerve, meaning not only the major three branches (ophthalmic, maxillary, and mandibular), but the minor branches out of Meckel's cave as well. In addition to that, she is having branching across into adjacent cranial nerves. These sensations range from moderately intense to maximally intense (meaning she is experiencing at times the same sensations someone would have if their skull was being crushed to pulp, or face was being cut deeply open in many places, etc.), but at least they can be controlled somewhat by extremely high levels of antiseizure medication. Between the sensations and medication, though, she is effectively completely disabled while the nerve undergoes this type of healing. The good news is that her neurosurgeons have never seen, either themselves or in any journals, a case of this that does not resolve when the restructuring reaches its end-stage, which occurs after six to twelve months. The intermediate time, though, is Hell for her. I would love to see more research done on this, as I would be curious to see if various signalling mechanisms are not genetically nominal in the <10% of cranial nerve rhizotomy patients who have this type of post-procedural effect.
Please, let's continue the research on SOCS3 here, and the other research being done out there on the various other known signalling mechanisms.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
That would be Phenomenal.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Or maybe there's just no particularly good reason for them to regrow, meaning, an organism with a badly damaged brain is in dire shape, and unlikely to live long enough to reproduce. Now, that answer sucks from a "But I don't wanna die!" perspective, but evolution doesn't care about that.
Now, humans, being a pretty cheeky bunch, have no problem looking at this as a challenge to be overcome, and due to the fact that we can provide an individual with time and the proper environment to recover from this kind of injury. We can just come along, say "Gee, may have made sense 10,000 years ago when we were swinging from trees, but now why don't we fix this and let Bill recover instead".
Brain injuries like that are rare enough and (without care) fatal enough that we may just have never evolved a repair mechanism, because it didn't grant much of an advantage in survival.
Or maybe it'll make our brains grow uncontrollably until our eyes pop out and our skulls crack open. Could go either way I suppose....
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
In study after study, scientists have been conclusively proven to cause cancer in laboratory rats.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I'm sure this is also going to vary based upon the level of disability. A C1-2 Quad already has so many possible health risks that a tremendous increase in cancer actually represents an increase if life expectancy. I will leave the quality of life debate for someone else, too many variables and too many different levels of each condition.