A study in mice hints at a new way to treat spinal cord injuries

After a devastating spinal cord injury, mice’s nerve cells balloon up in size. Kind of some these neurons stay swollen longer than expected and commence to die, a learn about published September 25 in Science Translational Medicine shows. A drug that brought this swelling down improved the mice’s recovery, though it’s no longer yet known if the approach would work in people.

Until now, the details of neuron swelling within the spinal cord weren’t clear, says Bo Chen, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. “We didn’t know how long [the cells stay swollen], or if they’re going to die,” he says. “We were guessing.”

Chen and his colleagues devised a technique to set up out these cells within the aftermath of a spinal cord injury. The approach relied on genetic engineering, transparent spinal cord tissue and machine learning to help analyze cell shapes. It is going to definitely yielded views of more than 30,000 neurons spread across a three-millimeter span of spinal cord of every mouse.

Cells known as inhibitory neurons, which dampen other cells’ activity, swelled quickly after an injury, peaking at day two and returning to their normal size by day 14, the team found. But excitatory neurons showed a really different pattern. These cells, which ramp up other cells’ activity, ballooned up and stayed swollen longer, some for as much as 35 days. More of those kinds of cells died, too.

A drug known as bumetanide, which is used to treat edema in people, reduced this cellular swelling and resulting cell death in mice. Mice given the drug after an injury were better ready to move their legs than mice no longer given the drug, the researchers report.

The outcomes point to neuron swelling as a very important a portion of spinal cord injuries. Still, more research needs to be done to evidently how this process works in people, and whether bumetanide would possibly assist, Chen says.