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Hello and welcome to my new blog. As I’ve mentioned on my home page, I will be writing about medical issues which will be mainly revolving around rare conditions and medical breakthroughs – two areas of medicine I find particularly interesting. I’m hoping some of this information may be of some use to those reading this. If you happen to have a rare (or common) medical condition or you would like to know more regarding a particular area of medicine, feel free to contact me.
I thought I’d write my first article on the new groundbreaking revolutionary treatments hoping to cure spinal cord paralysis. This type of paralysis, typically caused by physical trauma, can be instantaneously life-altering and there are no disability altering treatment options. I find the current research treatment options interesting for various reasons – namely because a ‘cure’ for those with paralysis seems genuinely close. For as long as mankind has been on this planet, around 200 000 years, a severed spinal cord has meant one thing: paralysis. However, in the last few years, things look to be changing, bringing hope to those who suffer from this devastating disability.
In 2014, British and Polish scientists collaborated to trial a new potential treatment option for spinal cord paralysis, involving regenerative medicine. This treatment, developed by the University College London and carried out by specialist neurosurgeons in Poland, involved inserting the patient’s own specialist nerve cells (Olfactory ensheathing cells – OECs) into the empty space in the patient’s spinal cord. This is thought to allow regeneration of the spinal cord to effectively plug this missing gap, allowing the brain and peripheral nerves to communicate again. The patient who this treatment had been trialed on, previously a firefighter, was able to walk again (albeit with the aid of a walking frame). Professor Raisman, who discovered the potential of these OECs, believes this treatment has the potential to ‘get patients out of wheelchairs’ and ‘will result in a historic change in the currently hopeless outlook for people disabled by spinal cord injury’.
Another promising approach to the treatment of spinal cord injury was published just last week (Sept, 2018) in The New England Journal of Medicine. Groundbreaking work by the University of Louisville and the Mayo clinic, showed that 4 previously paralysed patients were able to regain previous motor abilities. Of these patients, 2 were able to walk aided, the other 2 able to stand independently. This approach differed from the one outlined above, and involved the insertion of an electrical stimulation device called ‘epidural electrical stimulation’, or EES. The precise mechanisms remain unknown, however it is thought that this device is able to stimulate residual spinal cord cells, enhancing their ability to communicate with downstream nerves. This treatment however, involved intensive physiotherapy in conjunction with the electrical stimulation, with the two patients that were eventually able to walk, enduring a total of 359 physiotherapy walking sessions between them. Despite this taking many months of gruelling physical activity, the patients seemed satisfied with the progress they had made and were hopeful for the future.
If any more research is published on these (or other) potential treatments for spinal cord injury, I will update this article.
If you, or someone you know, suffers from paralysis as mentioned in this article, please get in touch and let me know your thoughts.
All Things Medicine 