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News of his progress has gripped the paralysis community. Experts rightly caution that one patient's improvement hardly guarantees the same for others. Nonetheless, Washington University in St. Louis, Mo.,where Reeve's therapy is overseen, has been flooded with e-mails and phone calls from others with spinal injuries. Doctors there stress that everything from individual anatomy to the extent of the injury to access to rehabilitative care--and Reeve has had the best--determines one's prognosis...
Indeed, Reeve's entire spinal-injury classification has been upgraded. The American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA) ranks patients on a five-level scale from A, which is virtually no sensation or motion, to E, which is normal. "Chris was an ASIA A before," says McDonald. "He's now an ASIA...
...that happen? Until recently, accepted wisdom was that spinal tissue can never regrow, but that's being rethought. McDonald has conducted studies with spine-injured rats in which some of the animals are given no therapy after injury and others are given exercise. When their cords are later examined, the stimulated animals show new cell growth at the site of the lesion. "We believe," says McDonald, "that we can induce selective and robust cell growth...
Remarkable as Christopher Reeve's rehabilitation has been, doctors know that physical therapy can go only so far. To cure paralysis, they will have to find a way to repair or replace damaged spinal-cord nerves. Most of the research to date has been conducted on laboratory animals, but those experiments have set the stage for what scientists believe could be a burst of advances in human patients. "This is an exciting time in spinal-cord-injury research," says Dr. Wise Young, director of the Center for Collaborative Neuroscience at Rutgers University. "The progress in getting experimental therapies into clinical...
...licensed a gene that would allow it to successfully stabilize human brain cells derived from fetuses and to proceed with treatments for different brain diseases. Eventually these could be used to combat Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, diabetes, chronic heart and kidney disease, liver failure, cancer and spinal-cord injury. Though stem cells can be obtained from adult tissue, scientists say they must also experiment with cells from fetuses and embryos if stem-cell research is to be translated into such specific therapies in humans. Anti-abortionists and some religious groups oppose any research on human embryos and fetuses...