Although any cure for injuries in humans is some way off, new work that restores mobility to mice after spinal injuries seems pretty exciting.
“When spinal cord damage blocked direct signals from the brain, under certain conditions the messages were able to make detours around the injury,” says UCLA researcher Michael Sofroniew, who led the work (press release). “The message would follow a series of shorter connections to deliver the brain’s command to move the legs.”
Until now it was thought that the only way for function to be restored was for long nerves from the brain to the base of the spinal cord to re-grow. Instead Sofroniew found that ‘propriospinal relay connections’ bypassed injuries, like drivers faced with an accident taking different routes rather than waiting for the crash to be cleared (Nature Medicine abstract).
After blocking half of the long nerve fibres – but leaving untouched the chain of connected shorter nerves at the centre of the spinal cord- they found mice regained some walking ability within eight weeks. Admittedly, they walked slower and with less confidence than before. But they were nonetheless walking.
Now the challenge will be to find ways of making this sort of thing happen in people.
“We have identified what appears to be a previously unrecognized mechanism for recovery of function after these kinds of injuries. And we need to understand it better and learn how to exploit it better, through doing the right kind of rehab training and through figuring out ways to stimulate this kind of recovery,” he told Reuters.
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