There’s much excitement in the UK media over a story broken by New Scientist that nerves can be grafted over injured sections of spinal cord in rats.

At a conference in New York, John Martin of Columbia University described how he and his colleagues cut motor nerves away from the abdominal muscles they normally connected with. They then stretched the cut ends of these nerves down past injury sites on the rats’ spines and glued them in place, says the magazine (subscription required).

Later the researchers found their grafted nerves had begun to form connections with motor nerves below the injuries. “Zapping the spinal cord above the injury made the lower limbs of the rats twitch, showing that motor signals had begun once again to pass along the entire length of the spine,” NS reports.

Giorgio Terenghi, of the University of Manchester in the UK, told the BBC, “It’s a very good idea, but the key thing is how much function they will be able to restore using this technique.” The research has not yet been published in a journal.

How much function is being restored in rats, let alone humans, is unclear at the moment. Nevertheless it is predictably being hailed as a potential cure for victims of paralysis (eg, Daily Mail, Guardian, PA).

RelatedRecent Nature medicine paper on recovery after spinal injuries.

Great Beyond post on the above paper.

Image: Getty