HEADLINES Published December3, 2014 By Staff Reporter

New Drug May Help Cure Damaged Spine, Hope Swirls For People With Spine Injuries

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Spinal Cord
(Photo : commons.wikimedia.org) The spinal cord is very fragile and any damage can cause paralysis.

For the first time in history, a new research says that they have developed a new drug that might give hope to people suffering from debilitating spine injuries. The drug can heal the damaged spine.

Apparently, they tested the drug on rats and they found out that the drug works on nerve cells that are cut or damaged, making a new connection. It helped the rats move their back legs and take control of their bladders again.

The ground-breaking discovery was pioneered by National Institutes of Health funded scientists. Jerry Silver, a neuroscience professor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio who led the study said, "This recovery is unprecedented."

Laboratory research can lead to new discoveries on therapies and treatments for illnesses that seem to have no hope in the past. "We're very excited at the possibility that millions of people could, one day, regain movements lost during spinal cord injuries," Jerry Silver, Ph.D. professor of neurosciences, Case Western Reserve University School of the study said.

The history of the research study can be traced back to a hunch by Bradley Lang, Ph.D. who is the lead author of the study and a graduate student in Dr. Silver's laboratory. He came up with the idea of developing a drug that would help axons regenerate without touching the healing spinal cord. "Originally this was just a side project we brainstormed in the lab," said Dr. Lang.

At present, when someone would have a broken spine, there's no treatment or way to heal it. Other treatments entail people growing back their nerve cells. There are invasive surgeries present but the prognosis is usually not so good. Treatments like stem cell injections, nerve tissue transplants and implants of neurostimulators are present but not so promising and are expensive.

However, this discovery entails a non-invasive procedure because the drug will be injected. According to Lyn Jakeman, a program director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, part of the National Institutes of Health, which helped pay for the study, "There are currently no drug therapies available that improve the very limited natural recovery from spinal cord injuries that patients experience. This is a great step toward identifying a novel agent for helping people recover."

Dr. Silver is hopeful that their discovery could help many people regain their movements lost during spinal cord injuries. However, one of the predicaments with spinal cord injury is the appearance of scar tissues. The body grows a lot of scar tissues and even if nerve cells would send signals across the damage, scar tissues usually block them.

Each year, about 250,000 to 500,000 people suffer from spinal cord injury. Most of them are caused by preventable causes such as vehicle accidents, falls or violence.

Spinal cord injury is associated with lower rates of school enrollment and economic participation, and it carries substantial individual and societal costs.

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