Would a cure for spinal cord injury help people with polio?
A recent newspaper headline, World first: Monash team grows nerve cells, went on to say that the discovery gives hope to Christopher Reeve and others with spinal cord injury that there may one day be a cure for their condition. Will this research help people with polio? No, explains Dr Richard Bruno. “The hope with spinal cord injury is that new nerve cells would ‘bridge the gap’ in the damaged cord and ‘heal the cut’, allowing the brain to talk to the motor nerves again. This notion requires a small and relatively clean ‘gap’ and intact motor neurons down below the lesion. In polio survivors there are NO motor neurons, so new motor neurons would have to grow. Then, they would have to send out new axons, like telephone wires, to the muscles they used to activate, since the old axons deteriorated 40+ years ago. This is a daunting task of ‘tunnel building’ through legs that have the longest nerves in the body. Finally the brain would have to send out new axons (since the old axons shrunk
