Posted on behalf of Tim Sands

Good news if the small furry creature in your life has had a nasty spill recently – perhaps taking a tipsy tumble after a night out with one of the hard-drinking cousins we reported on earlier this week. Two studies are hot on the trail of injury treatments for our murine friends, with potential benefit for us too, naturally.

Researchers at the Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center, University of Louisville show us why putting injured rats in wheelchairs may not be the best way for them to heal up, as reported in New Scientist and picked up by our red-top pals elsewhere.

David Magnuson and friends constructed rat-sized wheelchairs into which they strapped rats with spinal cord injuries so they couldn’t use their rear legs for five nights a week.

After eight weeks of this regime and a further eight weeks without use of the chair, the rats had recovered less walking and swimming ability than rats that had spent the whole 16 weeks running free. “Our data suggests that wheelchair restriction definitely impairs functional recovery in rats, and logically it would seem to apply also to humans,” said Magnuson.

If you are tittering at the thought of rats in wheelchairs, you are a bad person. You are also not alone. “Most people when they see the rat wheelchair, their first response is to chuckle, because it does look comical, but then they realise we are trying to address some pretty important questions,” Magnuson continues.

In other news, Physorg.com reports that researchers have found that one particular strain of mice has remarkable powers of regeneration. In contrast to other mice, males of the MRL/MpJ strain can seamlessly re-grow ear cartilage wounds without scarring. The new experiments, published in Osteoarthritis and Cartilage (paper), show the mice can even bounce back from a knee-capping. They grow back a significant amount of cartilage in three months following a knee injury. The researchers are still working on how the mice perform this trick.

Initial funding was supplied by the National Football League Charities: “Cartilage injuries can be career-ending for football players,” said researcher Jamie Fitzgerald. In contrast, cartilage injuries appear to be positively career-starting for mice in this lab. I hope they at least gave them a wheelchair. No, wait…

Image: Getty