Spinal Cord Injury Recovery

When treating a person with a spinal cord injury, repairing the damage created by injury is the ultimate goal. By using a variety of treatments, greater improvements are achieved, and, therefore, treatment should not be limited to one method. Furthermore, increasing activity will increase his/her chances of recovery.

Making Connections
In order to restore movement and sensation, axons must grow from surrounding healthy tissue into the site of injury and then continue on to the brain. Even when researchers are able to stimulate the growth of injured axons, they often find they cannot get the axons to grow beyond the site of injury itself.
To promote this growth, Mark Tuszynski, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, added nerve cells and growth factors to the injury site and beyond. By leaving behind a trail of bread crumbs to guide axons at points along the spinal cord, for the first time researchers witnessed "axons regenerating into and beyond an injury site," Tuszynski explains.
Improving locomotor function
Improvement of locomotor function is one of the primary goals for people with a spinal cord injury. SCI treatments may focus on specific goals such as to restore walking or locomotion to an optimal level for the individual. The most effective way to restore locomotion is by complete repair, but techniques are not yet developed for regeneration. Treadmill training, over groundtraining, and functional electrical stimulation can all be used to improve walking or locomotor activity. These activities work if neurons of the central pattern generator (CPG) circuits, which generate rhythmic movements of the body, are still functioning. With inactivity, the neurons of CPG degenerate. Therefore, the above activities are important for keeping neurons active until regeneration activities are developed. A 2012 systematic review found insufficient evidence to conclude which locomotor training strategy improves walking function most for people with spinal cord injury. This suggests that it is not the type of training used, but the goals and the routines that have the biggest impact.
While there is a wide range of experimental approaches to treating spinal cord injury, they all share a common goal: improving the lives of people with spinal cord injuries.

"What we know about spinal cord injury has dramatically increased in the last 40 years," says Guest. "The rate of acceleration of improvements in treating spinal cord injuries will continue in the next decades, and the outlook for such patients will only get better."