SCI Research Update

Finally, some good news - I'm getting a little impatient! Researchers based at the Children's Hospital in Boston have made a potential breakthrough regarding nerve regeneration in the spinal cord. About damn time!

As long as I never have this hair-do, I'm good.

Nerves grow at a snail's pace anyway, but the corticospinal tract, a bundle of nerves connecting the brain and the spinal cord, are particularly resistant to regeneration after injury. And being near the brain, you guessed it, they're important. Th research team, in rodent studies, were able to achieve this corticospinal nerve regrowth by deleting a specific enzyme, PTEN, that usually acts as a brake on cell growth. Early in life, this enzyme's activity is low, allowing a person's necessary growth, but scales up to restrict growth as a person develops, to prevent giants/monsters from growing among us. By eliminating this pesky and annoying enzyme, the damaged nerves can reconnect and the blocked signals from brain to legs can be successfully sent.

          'He, Steward and their colleagues are now asking whether the PTEN-deletion treatment leads to restoration of motor function in mice with spinal cord injury. While the finding of anatomical connections between regenerating nerves and nerve cells beyond the lesion site is encouraging, in order for nerve regeneration to result in restoration of motor function the anatomical connections must represent real sites of information transfer.'

Basically, the nerves must not only be physically connected but also transmit the correct message. God speed, researchers!