Risk Of Injury Of The Spinal Cord During Diving Is Very High

Risk Of Injury Of The Spinal Cord During Diving Is Very High.
About 6000 Americans under the adulthood of 14 are hospitalized each year because of a diving injury, and 20 percent of diving accidents denouement in a punitive spinal line injury, researchers say. To encourage diver safety, University of Michigan (U-M) researchers impetus bathers to use caution near any body of water and to jump feet first in shallow distilled water or if the depth is unknown. "Our neurosurgery team here at U-M knows how heartbreaking spinal twine injuries can be," Karin Muraszko, chair of the department of neurosurgery and chief of pediatric neurosurgery, said in a word release. "We can provide these patients with top-notch, state-of-the-art care, but we'd much rather they are not marred to begin with.

We can't put the spinal cord back together. So the best thing we can do is prevent these injuries". You don't have to hit bottom to get injured, the line-up pointed out. "The surface tension on the fizzy water can be enough to injure the spinal cord," cautioned Dr Shawn Hervey-Jumper, a neurosurgery resident, in the same statement release.

The spinal cord transmits signals from the brain to a muscle. When the spinal rope gets injured, the brain's signal is blocked, Hervey-Jumper explained. To drive tellingly the message, the department of neurosurgery has launched a series of public service announcements and videos that will appearance at movie theaters in Michigan this summer.

To Protect From Paralysis Associated With Spinal Cord Injuries Can Oriented On Genes Therapy

To Protect From Paralysis Associated With Spinal Cord Injuries Can Oriented On Genes Therapy.
A look in rats is raising redesigned expectation for a treatment that might help spare people with injured spines from the paralysis that often follows such trauma. Researchers found that by at once giving injured rats a drug that acts on a specific gene, they could halt the chancy bleeding that occurs at the site of spinal damage. That's important, because this bleeding is often a major cause of paralysis linked to spinal line injury, the researchers say.

In spinal cord injury, fractured or dislocated bone can compress or damage axons, the long branches of nerve cells that transmit messages from the body to the brain. But post-injury bleeding at the site, called avant-garde hemorrhagic necrosis, can fetch these injuries worse, explained study author Dr J Marc Simard, a professor of neurosurgery, pathology and physiology at University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

Researchers have want been searching for ways to deal with this not original injury. In the study, Simard and his colleagues gave a drug called antisense oligodeoxynucleotide (ODN) to rodents with spinal twine injuries for 24 hours after the injury occurred. ODN is a unambiguous single strand of DNA that temporarily blocks genes from being activated. In this case, the stupefy suppresses the Sur1 protein, which is activated by the Abcc8 gene after injury.

After shtick injuries, Sur1 is usually a beneficial part of the body's defense mechanism, preventing room death due to an influx of calcium, the researchers explained. However, in the case of spinal cord injury, this defense arrangement goes awry. As Sur1 attempts to prevent an influx of calcium into cells, it allows sodium in, Simard explained, and too much sodium can cause the cells to swell, shock up and die.

In that sense, "the 'protective' instrument is a two-edged sword," Simard said. "What is a very fine thing under conditions of moderate injury, under severe injury becomes a maladaptive mechanism and allows unchecked sodium to come in, causing the stall to literally explode".

However, the new gene-targeted analysis might put a stop to that. Injured rats given the drug had lesions that were one-fourth to one-third the size of lesions in animals not given the drug. The animals also recovered from their injuries much better.