Spinal Cord Injury Research Paper

There are roughly 12,000 new cases of spinal cord injury (SCI) each year and the number of people living with SCI is estimated to be around 273,000. Experiencing a Spinal cord injury is both physically traumatic as well as mental. Healthy individuals go from doing everything themselves to having to rely on others for basic needs. Majority of the time they lose the ability to walk, control their bladder, bowls and developed sexual dysfunction. This has a tremendous negative psychological impact on the patients. A lot of the patients also experience neuropathic pain (NP), a debilitating disease that can last a life time, further impacting the patient's quality of life. This paper will discuss the different research that’s being done that might …show more content…
The CNS includes your brain and spinal cord, while the PNS connects the CNS to the rest of the body. The cells in the nervous system are called neurons. The neuron is comprised of three parts; the dendrite, cell body and the axon. The dendrites are processes that receive input into the neuron; they are attached to the cell body. The axon is the primary process that extends from the cell body and transmits information away from the cell body. When there is an injury to the CNS, these processes, and therefore information exchange between cells are disrupted. This disruption leads to loss of communication between neurons and thus loss of function (e.g. …show more content…
CNS vs. PNS injury). After a traumatic event to a CNS axon the neurons are unable to regrow to their intended destination. However, neurons in the PNS regenerate a lot easier. Figuring out the reason why that occurs has become a hot topic in neuroscience. Scientists are studying numerous extrinsic factors that inhibit growth such as: microglia, astrocytes, macrophages and the by-products of myelin degradation. Extrinsic factors aren’t the only thing affecting axon recovery; intrinsic factors also play a major role. Intrinsic factors refer to the genes that are expressed with the cell. One fascinating intrinsic factor is transcription factors, which are proteins that attach to DNA and activate or in some cases repress certain gene expression. To identify intrinsic factors important to axon regeneration many scientists compare gene expression between regenerating and non-regenerating. All CNS neurons are incapable of regeneration past the early postnatal period, this is a key issue since most injuries occur in adults. PNS neurons (e.g dorsal root ganglion neurons; DRGs) are capable of regenerating and are commonly used as a model for regeneration and were used in the model that identified Serum response factor (SRF) as a key determinant of regeneration in DRG neurons (Lerch et al.,

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