Nerve Repair Treatment for Spinal Cord Injury(SCI)
by Drs.Like Wu, Xiaojuan Wang, Bo Cheng and Susan Chu
Wu Medical Center, Bejing, China
Trauma is the main cause of spinal cord injury syndrome, while other causes can be spinal cord ischemia or bleeding, progressive spinal cord compression, spinal cord necrosis, demyelination, or inflammatory damage (myelitis), etc..
After the spinal cord gets injured, the spinal cord tissue would undergo necrosis, and irreversible structural damage would be caused. Nerve cell degeneration, necrosis and loss, and remarkable reduction in cell number would be the causes for spinal nerve dysfunction, and that is why patients are always left with lifelong disabilities. For now, there are very few effective treatments that could help repair nerve functions for patients with sequelae of spinal cord injury.
With ten years of treatment experience, Wu Medical Center (WMC) has brought new treatment methods（Neural stem cell + CAST treatment）, which aims to supply neurons and oligodendrocytes, repair and replace the damaged spinal cord in structure and functions, so as to help improve patient’s motor functions. In treating chronic spinal cord, formation of new myelin sheaths on nerve fibers is required for restoring patient’s sensory system. Only when the neural transmission gets facilitated, can patient’s urinary sensation and control get restored.
About Spinal Cord Injury
A spinal cord injury has the closest relationship with the paralysis syndrome, which is caused by ischemia or hemorrhaging of the spinal cord, the rapidly progressive compression, necrosis, demyelination, or myelitis.
Prognosis
A pressure or cut on the spinal cord can cause damage of gray matter in the spinal cord nerve cells. The white matter nerve fiber and the different amounts of hemorrhaging, where the most severe is in the center of the vessel, the parts of the damaged area become gelatinous liquefactive cavities or ferrite liquefactive cavities. These can become a progressive fibrosis or/and cavity in the brain or/and the membrane of the spinal cord after months or years time. Parts of the damaged area can become the delayed central cord syndrome.
Clinical Effect
The complete spinal cord injury: 1) All of the voluntary movement below the injury level are a persistent loss immediately 2)Anesthesia below the injury level and reflection termination in the segment of spinal cord transection (spinal shock). Following are the hyperreflexia stage and sequela stage.
The first 10 days after the injury are the most dangerous period, risk factors include: infection, shock, intestinal obstruction, etc. Examinations such as CT's and MRI's, and appropriate treatment such as decompression of the spinal cord surgery should be arranged, but physically moving the patient should be minimized during this period. The death rate rapidly declines 3 months after onset of injury, about 86% paraplegia patients and 80% quadriplegia patients can live more than 10 years after onset of injury. No other effective treatment can help the patients in this period except the symptomatic treatment.
Wu Stem Cells Medical Center holds the view that the newest therapy to treat a sequelae injury of the spinal cord is through cell therapy. In treatment practice they found that the secretion function from the stem cells can start a self-repair function in the nervous tissue; so the stem cells be transplanted into the body and therefore can participate in the repair of the nerve injury to recover the nerve pathway, then the patients can obtain more functions.
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