Strategies to induce recovery from lesions of the spinal cord have not fully resulted in clinical applications. This is a consequence of a number of impediments that axons encounter when trying to regrow beyond the lesion site, and that intraspinal rearrangements are subjected to. In the present study we evaluated (1) the possibility to improve locomotor recovery after complete transection of t...

PURPOSE To establish the safety, efficacy, and value of preoperative angiography in the surgical management of thoracic and lumbar spine disease, in which it is important to avoid injury to the artery of Adamkiewicz or other vessels that supply the spinal cord. METHODS Sixty-one patients were evaluated primarily using digital subtraction angiography, low-osmolar or nonionic contrast agents, s...

Mutations in the gene that encodes Cu/Zn-superoxide dismutase (SOD1) are the cause of approximately 20% of familial forms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a fatal neurodegenerative disease characterized by the progressive loss of motor neurons. While ALS symptoms appear in adulthood, spinal motoneurons exhibit functional alterations as early as the embryonic and postnatal stages in the m...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Spinal cord ischemia with resulting paraplegia is a devastating complication of thoracoabdominal aortic surgery. Experimental models of spinal cord ischemia have been developed in primate, dog, pig, rabbit, and rat with variable reproducibility, but none has been developed in mouse. Because genetically engineered mice have become important to examine the impact of specifi...

The local anaesthetic activity of propranolol has been studied on the frog lumbar plexus and dog spinal cord. The anaesthetic action was of short latency and fairly long duration. The local toxicological studies after repeated local administration of propranolol did not reveal any sign of acute irritation or delayed tissue damage on rabbit cornea, guineapig skin and dog spinal cord. As judged b...

When two prion strains infect a single host, one strain can interfere with the ability of the other to cause disease but it is not known whether prion replication of the second strain is also diminished. To further investigate strain interference, we infected hamsters in the sciatic nerve with the long-incubation-period transmissible mink encephalopathy (TME) agent DY TME prior to superinfectio...

Background: The effect of chronic administration of 4-methylcatechol known as a neurotrophic factor inducer on the allodynia and spinal neurotrophic factors was investigated in chronic constrictive injury of sciatic nerve in rats. Methods: With the Sprague Dawly rat, sciatic nerve was loosely ligated with 4-0 chromic catgut and neuropathic pain model was made. The threshold for tactile allodyni...

Many neuropeptides have been shown to be up-regulated in response to pain. The purpose of this study was to identify pain-related peptides in a rat model of neuropathic pain induced by sciatic nerve cuff implantation. Rats were tested for touch sensitivity prior to and 7 days following cuff implantation or sham surgeries. The lumbar spinal cord was removed on the 8th day post-surgery and the lu...

The locations of spinothalamic neurons and the funicular trajectories of their axons were studied in cats by retrograde transport of horseradish peroxidase (HRP). Five animals were used as controls to determine the cervical and lumbar laminar distributions of neurons contributing to the spinothalamic tract. An additional eight animals were used to determine the funicular trajectories of the spi...

INTRODUCTION Intrathecal transplantation is a minimally invasive method for the delivery of stem cells, however, whether the cells migrate from the lumbar to the injured cervical spinal cord has not been proved in humans. We describe an attempt to track bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells in a patient with a chronic cervical spinal cord injury. CASE PRESENTATION A 33-year-old Thai man ...