We investigated whether imatinib (Gleevec®, Novartis), a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, could improve functional outcome in experimental spinal cord injury. Rats subjected to contusion spinal cord injury were treated orally with imatinib for 5 days beginning 30 minutes after injury. We found that imatinib significantly enhanced blood-spinal cord-barrier integrity, hindlimb locomotor function, senso...

Spinal cord contusion injury (SCI) is known to induce pain-related behaviour, as well as hyperresponsiveness in lumbar dorsal horn nociceptive neurons associated with the aberrant expression of Na(v)1.3, a rapidly repriming voltage-gated sodium channel. Many of these second-order dorsal horn neurons project to third-order neurons in the ventrobasal complex of the thalamus. In this study we hypo...

During the past few years, several approaches to spinal-cord repair have been successfully established in animal models. For their use in trials of spinal-cord injury (SCI) in human beings, specific difficulties that affect the success of clinical trials have to be recognised. First, transection of the spinal cord is commonly applied in animal models, whereas contusion, which generally leads to...

objective: spinal cord injury (sci) causes inflammation, deformity and cell loss. it has been shown that melissa officinalis (mo), as herbal medicine, and dexamethasone (dex) are useful in the prevention of various neurological diseases. the present study evaluated combinational effects of dex and mo on spinal cord injury. materials and methods: thirty six adult male wistar rats were used in th...

Introduction Schwann cells differentiated from skin-derived precursors (SKP-SCs) have been shown to promote histological and functional recovery in a contusion model of rat spinal cord injury [1]. Cellular bands of SKP-SCs bridge the lesion site which promote axon growth ensheathed by peripheral (Schwann cell) myelin of endogenous as well as transplant origins. In this work, we assess the myeli...