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Posts Tagged ‘injuries’

Manning had surgery in May to correct a bulging disc in his neck, but it didn’t solve his problems. Prior to a third surgery in September, he took a private plane to an unknown hospital in an unnamed country, Fox’s Jay Glazer reported in a pregame show Sunday (clip below). The procedure is not available in the United States.

In an email, a Colts spokesman said the team's only comment was head coach Jim Caldwell's "no comment" during a Monday press conference. Caldwell said the team would not discuss Manning's medical issues.

That means details are scarce, but Fox's report said this was not a procedure involving embryonic stem cells. It's likely Manning underwent a procedure involving induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, which can be reprogrammed to become any type of cell. Glazer said he was informed that doctors cultured some of Manning's own fat cells and injected them into his neck, where they would ideally help regenerate damaged tissue. Researchers showed back in 2009 that fat cells could easily be turned into iPS cells, and do so much more quickly than the other common iPS cell progenitor, skin cells.

In any event, the fat-stem-cell procedure was insufficient, leading to Manning’s third neck surgery Sept. 8. The anterior fusion of two neck vertebrae was a success, but the future Hall-of-Famer will be sidelined for two to three months, likely missing the entire regular season.

Sports analysts said the stem cell procedure was evidence that Manning really wants to get back on the field this year (he's missed, like, one snap in his career prior to last week). It could also mean that his injury was more serious than some people thought. But let us pose another theory: It’s also evidence American stem cell therapy is still lagging. Researchers at Stanford started working with fat-derived iPS cells in 2009 — so why is a marquee NFL quarterback flying overseas for this therapy?

So-called stem cell tourism is nothing new, of course; risk-takers of wealthy and/or desperate stripes have been doing it for some time. And the reasons for American reluctance regarding stem cell procedures are many and varied. But when high-profile people like Peyton Manning start leaving this country for treatment that could be done at home, it’s a good opportunity to ask bigger questions than the quarterback’s personal motivations.

Glazer's Edge: Peyton's Stem Cells

[via ESPN]

The research team, led by Dr. Susan Harkema of the University of Louisville, Ky., stressed that the treatment is not a cure for paralysis and that it worked with just one patient in one trial. But researchers not involved in the study say it is promising — one UK doctor told the BBC it was “mind-blowing.”

The findings appear to show that the legs and spinal cord, not the brain, are in control of movement. That means interruption of messages from the brain may not preclude paralyzed patients from walking again — they would just need new electrical signals to stimulate the spinal cord.

Summers appeared in various media outlets Friday to discuss the research.

Weeks after winning the College World Series with Oregon State University in 2006, Summers was hit by a drunk driver, suffering spinal cord damage that paralyzed him from the chest down. Neuroscientists implanted 16 electrodes in his spine, and sent electrical impulses to his lower spinal cord, mimicking the signals normally sent by the brain to initiate movement. Summers was suspended over a treadmill while the signals were transmitted to his spine. Writing in the British medical journal The Lancet, researchers say the spinal cord’s own neural network, combined with sensory information from his legs, is able to to control muscle and joint movement.

Summers trained for two years with a treadmill and physical therapists moving his legs to help him stand and walk.

V. Reggie Edgerton of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA said sensory information is sent via neural networks in the legs directly to the spinal cord. The sensory feedback allows Summers to balance himself, bear his own weight and take steps over various speeds and directions, Edgerton said in a news release.

In a statement, Summers said the treatment has changed his life.

“For someone who for four years was unable to even move a toe, to have the freedom and ability to stand on my own is the most amazing feeling,” he said.

He was left with some sensation below the chest, so it’s not clear whether the treatment would work for spinal cord injury patients who experience no sensation. What’s more, Summers was an athlete in excellent physical condition before his injury, which could have helped his rehabilitation.

Still, his doctors hope that someday, patients with spinal cord injuries could use a portable electrical stimulation unit to move independently once again.

The work was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation.

[via BBC]

Researchers in Massachusetts are implanting injured mice with microthreads coated with human muscle cells, reports Technology Review. The threads are made of the same proteins the human body uses to heal wounds, and when seeded with muscle cells, they act as a scaffold for the construction of healthy tissue.

In a study presented earlier this month, George Pins, associate professor of bioengineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and his colleagues sliced out 30 percent of the lower leg muscle in some mice. They took microthreads made of the protein fibrin and coated them with human muscle cells that had been discarded during surgery, Tech Review says. Then they implanted the microthreads into the mouse muscle wounds.

Within a couple days, the cells integrated into the mouse tissue; after a week, the microthreads started to degrade. After 10 weeks, the wound was full of human cells, according to Pins.

Traumatic muscle injuries often don’t heal well because scar tissue can prevent them from functioning properly. And for muscle regeneration techniques to work, the tissue must align properly, or the muscles won’t contract.

The wounded mice had less scar tissue, suggesting the microthread technique could solve that problem, Tech Review reports. And the microthreads seemed to simulate native wound healing, signaling other cells to migrate to the wound area and grow new tissue in the right alignment. The researchers believe the microthreads even stimulated the mice to regrow their own tissue, not just human cells, but they need confirmation.

The next step is to determine whether the new human tissue behaves like real muscle.

[Technology Review]

A new wound dressing, developed at the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Modular Solid State Technologies EMFT in Munich, includes a special dye that reacts to different pH values.

The new trauma bandage insulates wounds just like any other bandage, but it provides a special window into how a wound is healing. Typically, healthy skin and healed wounds have a slightly acidic pH, around 5 or 6. If this value increases into the alkaline range, that can indicate infection, reports Gizmag.

If the pH value is between 6.5 and 8.5, the new bandage will turn purple, according to Dr. Sabine Trupp, a scientist at the EMFT. The indicator strip can allow patients and doctors to monitor for infection without having to change dressings. This is an advantage because removing a bandage can let in germs. The next step is to test the strips at a German hospital’s dermatology clinic.

Eventually, the researchers want to integrate an optical sensor, which could measure pH values and indicate the results on a screen, providing precise data about whether a wound is getting better.

[Gizmag]

In the German study, dogs with front and hind leg amputations ran on a treadmill for two-minute periods. Reflective markers were placed on the dogs' skin, enabling the team to follow the movement of separate part of the body using a set of high-speed infra-red cameras. They then compared the movements of dogs with different limbs missing (i.e., front-rear, left-right) with the natural movements of normal four-legged dogs to see what physical coping techniques the dogs employed to re-establish movement and limb function.

The team found that when a dog's hind leg is missing, the front legs continue to function as they normally would, with little or no modification needed. But when a dog has lost a front leg, the remaining limbs must undergo extreme adaptation to coordinate with each other, in a strategy known as "gait compensation." The researchers believe this is because fore-limbs are loaded more and have a much greater influence on the distribution of body weight in a four-legged animal. "Natural terrestrial locomotion is designed for an even number of limbs," said the study's lead researcher Martin Gross of the University of Jena in Germany. "After limb loss, a reorganization of the locomotive system is required."

Living creatures can evaluate their surroundings and injuries and adjust their movement or behavior accordingly, but robots are hard-wired to move and react in a specific way. The research was designed to help develop robots that can recover from an injury by adapting their movement, just as dogs learn to function with a handicap.

Results will be presented on Thursday at the annual meeting of the Society for Experimental Biology in Prague.

The implants would use light pulses to activate certain brain regions and reroute function

Such brain implants made from electrodes or optical fibers would sit on the brain's surface and monitor the electrical signals sent among neurons. They would also beam light pulses to stimulate specific parts of the brain in response, and ideally help the brain function normally despite having damaged areas.

The appropriately-named REPAIR (Reorganization and Plasticity to Accelerate Injury Recovery) project involves a team led by Stanford and Brown universities working with a two-year budget of $14.9 million. First up for the optogenetic tests are mice, rats and eventually monkeys.

Learning how to manage the human brain has been a top priority for DARPA in recent years, given the mad science lab's orders for technology such as cryogenic methods to freeze traumatic brain injury in its tracks. But they also seek to co-opt the brain's power for directly controlling prosthetic limbs usable by wounded warfighters. Even if this latest venture does not directly heal, it may at least help negate the effects of brain injuries so that it's as if they never existed.

[via Wired's Danger Room]

The implants would use light pulses to activate certain brain regions and reroute function

Such brain implants made from electrodes or optical fibers would sit on the brain's surface and monitor the electrical signals sent among neurons. They would also beam light pulses to stimulate specific parts of the brain in response, and ideally help the brain function normally despite having damaged areas.

The appropriately-named REPAIR (Reorganization and Plasticity to Accelerate Injury Recovery) project involves a team led by Stanford and Brown universities working with a two-year budget of $14.9 million. First up for the optogenetic tests are mice, rats and eventually monkeys.

Learning how to manage the human brain has been a top priority for DARPA in recent years, given the mad science lab's orders for technology such as cryogenic methods to freeze traumatic brain injury in its tracks. But they also seek to co-opt the brain's power for directly controlling prosthetic limbs usable by wounded warfighters. Even if this latest venture does not directly heal, it may at least help negate the effects of brain injuries so that it's as if they never existed.

[via Wired's Danger Room]