February 2008-
A breakthrough in spinal surgery offers hope to victims of paralysis.The technique, which has been tested on rats, involves bypassing damaged tissue in the spine.
This allows signals to travel across injured areas, New Scientist reports.Dr John Martin and his colleagues at Columbia University in New York have so far tested the procedure only on rodents. They selected a motor nerve branching from the healthy cord above the injury and cut it away from the abdominal muscle to which it is normally attached.They then stretched the free end across the injured section of spinal cord and used a protein "glue" to fix it.Read More...