Regeneration Can Be Achieved Even Years After Chronic Spinal Cord Injury

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine report that regeneration of central nervous system axons can be achieved in rats even when treatment delayed is more than a year after the original spinal cord injury.


"The good news is that when axons have been cut due to spinal cord injury, they can be coaxed to regenerate if a combination of treatments is applied," said lead author Mark Tuszynski, MD, PhD, professor of neurosciences and director of the Center for Neural Repair at UC San Diego, and neurologist at the Veterans Affairs San Diego Health System. "The chronically injured axon is not dead."


While there are more than 10,000 new spinal cord injuries annually in the United States, nearly 250,000 patients are living in the chronic stages of injury. Yet nearly all previous spinal cord injury studies have attempted to stimulate regeneration when treatment is begun almost immediately after injury -- because, in part, scientists considered it very difficult to achieve regeneration at such long time points after injury. None had shown successful regeneration in the late, chronic stages.

Reporting in the October 29 issue of the Cell Press journal Neuron, the UC San Diego team demonstrated successful regeneration of adult spinal cord axons into, and then beyond, an injury site in the cervical spinal cord, the middle region of the neck. Treatment was begun at time periods ranging from six weeks to as long as 15 months after the original injury in rats.

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