spinal cord injury

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a medical device tested about five years ago on actor Christopher Reeve.

It allows some spinal cord injury patients to breathe for at least four hours a day without a mechanical ventilator.

(American Physical Therapy Association) A new report shows that a non-ambulatory (unable to walk or stand) child with a cervical spinal cord injury was able to restore basic walking function after intensive locomotor training.

The case study, published in Physical Therapy (May 2008), the scientific journal of the American Physical Therapy Association, evaluated the effects of locomotor training in a 4 ½ year-old-boy, who had no ability to walk following a gunshot wound sixteen months earlier.

(Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine) Research on traumatic spinal cord injuries is hampered by a reliance on animal experiments that don’t accurately predict human outcomes, says a new study in the upcoming edition of the peer-reviewed journal Reviews in the Neurosciences.

The review was written by scientists with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

Men with serious injuries, such as traumatic brain injury or spinal cord injury, must deal with a range of emotions.

If these men have strong traditional masculine ideas and abuse alcohol, it becomes even more difficult to help them heal and come to terms with their emotions and situations.

A University of Missouri psychology researcher studied these challenging factors to find better ways to understand and treat men who fit this mold, such as the injured soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

A spinal cord injury often leads to paralysis because the damaged nerve fibers can't grow past scar tissue around the injury.

Researchers have shown that a nano-engineered gel injected into the spinal cord inhibits the formation of scar tissue and enables the nerve fibers to regenerate and grow up and down the spinal cord via a self-assembling scaffold.

When the gel was injected into mice with a spinal cord injury, the animals had a greatly enhanced ability to walk.

Erin Lavik, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Yale, was honored recently by the Connecticut Technology Council as one of their 2008 Women of Innovation.

Lavik, who was cited for her academic innovation and leadership, focuses her research on developing new therapeutic approaches for the treatment of spinal cord injury and retinal degeneration.