Each year, between 250,000 and 500,000
people around the world suffer spinal cord injury, which may lead to permanent
devastating symptom. It was considered
hopeless for treatment for many years. Now
researchers are trying to make progress by preserving nerve tissue, restoring nerve connections, and regaining
function.
Restore function is directly
related to preserve
nerve tissue and restore
axonal connectivity. Therefore, to
regain function, the nerve tissue must be preserved and axonal connectivity
must be established.
There are
several ways to preserve nerve tissue such as improving blood supply to the
injured area, decrease apoptosis and microgliosis, prevents caspase up-regulation,
reduce
caspase-3 and substrate cleavage, which may
promote recovery early after SCI in humans.
Rewiring nerve tissue is the
challenge of spinal cord injury (SCI) research to restore axonal connectivity
to denervated targets. The current problem
is that 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.
We have made major progress for the systematic
recovery of spinal cord injury in the three area: function restoration, tissue
preservation, axon connection establishment (see the above image showing the axon connection establishment).
