Do you have questions men's health related?
Please send them!
If you have a question related to men's health, please fill the form bellow.
1. It is a must to provide a valid email, unless you want your questions to be ignored.
We won't make your email public, but we like to talk with live persons.
2. To protect
your identity, take care the name you fill. We make public your name exactly as it is.
|
Public release date: 09 November 2009
[
]
Damaged nerve fibers in spinal cord injuries could be repaired using nano-spheres
Experts at Purdue University have developed a new approach for repairing damaged nerve fibers in
spinal cord injuries using nano-spheres that
could be injected into the blood shortly after an accident.
The synthetic "copolymer micelles" are drug-delivery spheres about 60 nanometers in diameter, or roughly 100 times smaller than the diameter of a red blood cell.
The research team has been studying how to deliver drugs for cancer treatment and other therapies using these nano-spheres. The conclusion was medications might be harbored in the cores and ferried to diseased or damaged tissue.
Purdue researchers have now revealed that the micelles themselves repair damaged axons, fibers that transmit electrical impulses in the spinal cord.
The researchers also concluded that without the micelles treatment about 18 percent of axons recover in a segment of damaged spinal cord tested in a "double sucrose gap recording chamber." The micelles treatment boosted the axon recovery to about 60 percent. They used the chamber to study how well micelles repaired damaged nerve cells by measuring the "compound action potential," or the ability of a spinal cord to transmit signals.
The Purdue experiment mimics what happens during a traumatic spinal cord injury. Findings showed that micelles might be used to repair axon membranes damaged by compression injuries, a common type of spine injury.
Findings are detailed in a research paper appearing Sunday (Nov. 8) in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
# # #
Source: Purdue University
|
|
