Essay On Spinal Cord Injury

* Following a SCI, the first priority is often to help the patient develop as much possible strength in the

1. For each of the following diagnostic test results, note which specific part of the brain would have to be damaged to create those symptoms. (include right and left sides in your analysis).

Before we determine how stem cells can treat various diseases including spinal cord injuries, let us first

Approximately 7,800 people suffer from a new spinal cord injury every year in the United States. Eighty-two percent of spinal cord injuries happen to males. The age group most at risk for spinal cord injury is 16-30 years old. Fifteen percent of spinal cord injuries are a result of violence, forty-eight percent result from motor vehicle accidents, and twenty-one percent result from falls. Suffering a spinal cord injury can result in a complete change in lifestyle. It can affect relationships, ability to work, and basic daily tasks such as bathing. My research question will address some of the ways a paraplegic has to adjust his daily routine, things they have to be aware of following a spinal cord injury, as well as focus on ways they can become

Chronic Neuropathic Pain after Spinal Cord Injury: Spinal cord injury (SCI) affects up to 500,000 people every year around the world (Singh et al., 2014) with devastating physical, psychological and social consequences. SCI not only damages motor systems, it also directly affects sensory systems, causing chronic, debilitating neuropathic pain. The incidence of neuropathic pain after SCI is extremely high, with at least half and up to 90% of SCI individuals experiencing neuropathic pain, described as paroxysmal pain that can be continuous and may be evoked by any sensory stimulus, not necessarily painful. Current pharmacological interventions offer minimal, transient relief to a minority (30%) of sufferers of SCI-induced neuropathic pain (Cousins, 2012). Current treatment strategies utilize conventional drugs for chronic pain, which only address pain symptomatically and cannot provide lasting relief or prevent relapse of symptoms, leading to drug dependency and further reducing quality of life for SCI patients. Due to the myriad events that take place after SCI, delineating the causes of neuropathic pain development is difficult. Neuropathic pain in general, and more so in SCI, has an inherent degeneracy in mechanisms, which is likely why targeted pharmacological treatment approaches often fail to provide significant relief.

A frightening 2.5 million people live with the burden of a spinal cord injury. Each year, more than 130,000 new injuries are reported (Oyinbo, 2011). A spinal cord injury is one of the most debilitating injuries, and puts a lifelong burden on not only the patient, but the caregiver as well. Years ago, a spinal cord injury translated to a lifetime of wheelchair confinement, endless comorbidities, and lost hope of ever regaining normal function. Treatment was limited, and patients suffered because of it. But research has come along way, and the future of spinal cord injuries looks more promising than ever.

Most spinal cord injuries are hard to treat due to the fragility of the vertebrae as a whole. Although; if left untreated, spinal cord injuries could affect motor and nerve control and function (Zhao et.al 2016). Stem injections are now commonly used as a type of rehabilitative medicine for injuries like those in the spine. This is because stem cells can take form of other specified cells it becomes exposed to. Once injected into the area of the injury, the cells are able to replicate and serve to renew the cells that have been lost or damaged. Three different studies done on rats were observed for the effects of outside variables, such as time and contents, on the efficiency of stem cell treatments. In one study, rats with the spinal cord

A simple car accident can result in a simple broken spine and a life with quadriplegia, a horrifying warning on the permanences of damage on the central nervous system. It is an unhealable injury, one which accompanies the victim for a lifetime. While thousands of years of medicine demonstrate the neuron’s regeneration incapability, studies have shown that spinal cord nerves have an innate regeneration ability. When reattached, they can restore themselves and allow the patient to regain movement. But healing the gray matter of the brain remained elusive until additional studies demonstrated that outside of the human body, the neurons can flourish. There was something other than the neurons that inhibited its growth and regeneration. This factor was later discovered to be a protein in the myelin and a product of the Nogo gene.

In the United States alone, there are approximately 12,000 new spinal cord injury cases each year (The National SCI Statistical Center [NSCISC], 2013). The severity of the patient’s injuries depends on how severe the spinal cord injury is, and where it is located at on the spinal column. If the spinal cord injury is complete, it renders the patient paralyzed below the injury. If the spinal cord injury is incomplete, the patient may have some movement and sensation below the injury (Medline Plus, 2014).

Injuries can happen to anyone, anywhere. Injuries affect people’s lives as they limit their choices, temporarily or permanently. Most injuries are not preventable, because most happen unexpectedly. For example, spinal cord injuries can occur if a person falls abruptly on his/her back and shatters their spinal cord. Although injuries cannot be prevented, they can be healed. New technologies are under development to solve major injuries, which do not yet have a cure. One of these major injuries is a spinal cord injury.

In the article “Stem Cell Therapy for Spinal Cord Injury” Neil H Riordan discusses that adult stem cells can treat spinal cord injuries. The spinal cord is a tube like structure that runs from the base of the skull to the end of the spine. If this is injured, it may cause loss of muscle movement, muscle control, sensation and body system control.This is usually caused by motor vehicle accidents, bad falls or sporting accident that fracture and crush the vertebrae. People can cope with their disabilities by going through physical therapy; however, spinal cord injury can be treated with allogeneic human umbilical cord tissue-derived stem cells and autologous bone marrow-derived stem cells. Treatment such as this can be done by injecting a total

When you hear the term ‘spinal cord injury’ you often associate this with something permanent, irreversible and extremely detrimental to the life of the individual affected. Recent studies into the application of induced pluripotent stem cells have found a way to potentially cure this condition, with the grafting of iPS cells to the human spine. It is impossible to argue with the results of recent research studies, which clearly demonstrate its capability to treat this condition. However, there is still some way to go until these studies can be applied to the treatment of humans, furthermore there are still many obstacles that must be overcome before research can proceed to the next level. iPS cells have the potential to differentiate

From a statistical information from the World Health Organization (WHO), patients who suffer from spinal cord injury (SCI) are around 250,000-500,000 people every year \cite{who2013}. An incidence of SCI mostly occurs from the unpreventable cause such as falls, traffic accidents, sports, and violence. SCI sufferers in males are higher than females at least 2 times. However, the major cause of SCI is the accidents \cite{who2013}. Consequently, we cannot certainly prevent or control numbers of SCI patients. SCI is the injury of the nervous system which can lead to permanent neurological deficits. A disruption of impulse conduction is a cause of non-functional body depending upon an injured level. Classification of SCI consists of 2 phases that are an acute phase and chronic phase

X-ray therapy stimulates the reconstruction of the spinal cord system after injury. The experiments also indicated that the anatomical rehabilitation of the spinal cord injured region is probably contrived from the x-ray treatment. The results demonstrated that the irradiation treatment possibly advances the restoration of the spinal cord central nervous system. In the sham-operated group, the NF count greatly increased at 14 weeks compared to 6 weeks. This revealed that the spinal cord central nervous system has a self-repair mechanism after spinal cord injury. There was no considerable disparity in the 10-Gy and the 20-Gy group from this experiment. In our results myelin showed first a decrease, and then an increase following spinal cord injury in rats. This outcome indicated that the spinal cord injury and repair coexisted, by being injured first and then repairing it. In addition, the myelin count significantly decreased in the irradiation group at week 14 after spinal cord injury, which showed that ionizing radiation also has lasting impacts on the spinal cord central nervous system. All in all, this experiment successfully verified that local x-irradiation could help the regeneration of the spinal cord in a rat

A review of the literature regarding spinal immobilisation has been undertaken using databases for PubMed, MEDLINE, CINAHL, OVID and Cochrane EBM. Reviews were electronically searched using the subject headings “spinal injuries”, “spinal immobilisation” and “management of spinal injuries”. The results generated by the search were limited to English language articles and reviewed for relevance to the topic. The aim of this literature review is to compare and contrast the views on spinal immobilisation and to achieve a better knowledge of evidence based practice.