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Showing posts from May 24, 2004

Drug helps paralysed rats walk again

Jane Sutton Reuters Monday, 24 May 2004 Rats with spinal cord injuries regained 70% of their normal walking function with a three-part treatment aimed at regrowing nerve cells, researchers have shown. The U.S. and Brazilian scientists grafted nerve cells, injected the rats with a special messenger molecule and an antidepressant to produce their results, which were published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Medicine. The researchers said that their approach could one day have implications for treating human paralysis. "[The research produced results] far greater than what we've seen in anything else," said the principal researcher, Dr Mary Bartlett Bunge, from the University of Miami School of Medicine "It opens up a potential new avenue of treatment for human spinal cord injury," said Bunge, who declined to speculate when human trials might be attempted. The spinal cord carries messages between the brain and the muscles through a network of nerve cells