Articles Posted in Spinal Cord Injury

The dangers of cheerleading have been in the news quite a bit recently. While the activity has become more akin to gymnastics than cheering for the sport team, there is very little oversight, and almost no training of coaches. Most high schools, for example, will simply hire a recent graduate to “coach” the cheerleading squad.

In Florida, a jury awarded a former gymnastics coach over $25 million for an accident that left him a quadriplegic from the neck down. Shane Downey was using some tumbling equipment a a North Florida Gymnastics and Cheerleading and fell and broke his neck. The jury decided the gym was entirely at fault for Downey’s catastrophic injuries.

This is an interesting verdict. Typically, a gym member would “assume the risk,” particularly someone who was apparently an accomplished gymnast like Downey.

In any spinal cord injury, the degree of ones recovery is usually dependent on the speed of treatment after the injury-producing event. The longer the wait, the more likely nerve cells wither and die, and paralysis follows. But now, for the first time, Neuroscientists at UCSD have been able to re-grow axons in damaged spinal cords in lab rats whose spinal cord injuries were up to a year old.

This discovery would not have been possible without the concentration of neuroscience research being performed in the San Diego area. Five major neuroscience institutions call San Diego home: UCSD, the Burnham Institute for Medical Research, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, The Scripps Research Institute and The Neurosciences Institute.

“San Diego has a heavy concentration of people doing both experimental and theoretical work, from molecule to the mind. There are only a few places in its league – cities like New York with Columbia University, Boston with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Baltimore with Johns Hopkins University,” Said Dr. Michael Goldberg, president of the Society for Neuroscience.

LA JOLLA – Spinal cord injury researchers from UC San Diego have announced a major advance in reconnecting nerve endings, which could lead to the reverse of paralysis in patients. The findings were published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Performing experiments on rats, scientists at the UCSD School of Medicine have, for the first time, successfully reconnected severed axons – parts of nerve cells that conduct electrical impulses. Using a nervous system growth factor called neuroptophin, researchers were able to guide severed axon endings to a correct paired axon ending and bond. This bonding formed electrical connections called synapses.

A recent survey by the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation found that 1.275 million Americans have suffered a spinal cord injury, and more than 5.6 million Americans live with some form of paralysis.

There is a great story in yesterday’s Orange County Register about the lone survivor of the car accident that killed Angel’s pitcher Nick Adenhart. Jon Wilhite was a passenger in the car with Adenhart when the collision occurred, and was hit with such force that he suffered atlanto-occipital dislocation, better known as “internal decapitation.”

Internal decapitation occurs when the skull literally separates from the spine, which kills 95% of its sufferers at the scene of the accident. Of the five percent who survive, half of those are rendered quadriplegic. Jon was one of the lucky ones.

“Jon is the first Orange County survivor of internal decapitation,” said Dr. Nitin Bhatia, director of the Spine Center at UCI Medical Center.

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