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Israeli researcher Michal Schwartz of the Weitzmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, recently reported a new finding that might lead to better treatments for human beings with |spinal cord| injuries.
In his experiments, Schwartz took rats whose spinal cords had been severed so their hind legs were paralyzed. She then treated the rats with their own white blood cells. Many of the animals who received this treatment experienced a restoration of some movement in their hind legs. The results of the experiment were reported in the July issue of Natural Medicine.
Schwartz said there is "a long way to go to see whether it works in humans," but her finding is the latest in a series of recent advances in understanding spinal cord injuries and one of several recent treatment regimens that have shown promise in laboratory animals.
In fact, Schwartz believes her discovery might explain why spinal cord cells, unlike other nerve cells, don’t usually regenerate after being damaged. In other injuries, macrophages (white blood cells) would race to the site of the damage to help repair it. In spinal cord injuries, however, this doesn’t happen.
Source:
"White blood cells regenerate severed spines in rats," Malcolm Ritter, Associated Press, June 29, 1998.