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Radiation regenerates spinal cord in rats
September 30, 1996
Web posted at: 11:20 p.m. EDTFrom Correspondent Brian Jenkins
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Four to five months after researchers severed its spinal cord, one laboratory rat exhibits the expected result: splayed rear legs and a complete lack of muscle control beyond the point where the cord was cut.
But another rat, whose spinal cord was similarly severed, has regained enough control to support its hindquarters.
The difference, according to researchers, is a dose of radiation applied to a small area around the injury some 17 or 18 days after the cord was cut.
The radiation destroyed a type of cell that starts to block the natural repair process of the spinal cord, a process that allows nerves to begin regeneration.
"About two-thirds of the muscles that are very close to the cut, say in the hip area ... the brain regained control of those muscles," said researcher Nurit Kalderon.
Kalderon conducted her studies at The Rockefeller University in New York, and her reports appear this week in a publication of the National Academy of Sciences.
She said her research does not offer the prospect of directly helping people who have already suffered spinal cord injuries. But in the future, specialized X-ray therapy could be used to help newly-injured patients, she said.
Whether it could help spinal cord patients walk again is not at all clear. Still, with physical therapy, she argues, people could regain more muscle control than the rats did in her study.
Some doctors at a workshop in Washington on spinal cord injuries viewed the new findings with caution.
"One of the problems is that very high doses of radiation are used, doses which normally kill cells," said Dr. Zach Hall, of the National Institutes of Health.
But Kalderon believes enough is known about radiation therapy to insure that dosages could be kept at a safe level for people.
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