Paraplegia, paraplegia healing, transverse syndrome Medical: Paraplegia, (spinal)
Therapy of a paraplegia
In the acute phase, the focus is on healing the spinal shock of paraplegia. Patients should be placed in the intensive care unit so that the heart, circulation and other organs can be constantly monitored. In principle, the healing of paraplegia naturally depends on its underlying cause.
If the injury to the spinal cord was caused by a fracture of the vertebral body, surgery is usually performed to correct the vertebral body or remove pressing elements. If an inflammatory process is present, the cure consists of taking medication (for example, cortisone or, in the case of multiple sclerosis, a special treatment plan) to control the inflammation. However, areas of the spinal cord that are already destroyed by paraplegia could not be influenced by the therapies/healing up to now, because damage to the nerves is irreversible.
However, there are current clinical studies that are concerned with the development of drugs that are hoped to promote the regeneration of nerve cells. The permanent consequences of paraplegia due to spinal cord damage usually become apparent after about six to eight weeks. Stem cells are cells in the body that have not yet specialized (differentiated) for a specific function or localization.
They are available as raw material, so to speak, and can transform from this state into many different cells. Theoretically it is possible to extract stem cells from the nervous system and use them in the therapy of damaged nerve tissue. However, there are various problems with this.
Removal is a dangerous surgical procedure because the stem cells have to be removed from the walls of the brain‘s ventricular system filled with cerebrospinal fluid. Besides, there are not many such cells in the body, which makes it difficult to obtain a sufficient amount of stem cells. Normally, in this case, it is possible to multiply the cells in the laboratory, but even here the situation is complicated by the low division rate (speed of cell multiplication) of neural stem cells. The therapy with stem cells is the subject of ongoing research; however, the process will probably take several years.
