Recent advances on acute paraplegia

Paraplegia and spinal cord injuries are issues of major concern to the actual medicine. But recent advances have raised hopes for a better prognosis, which has always been poor or infaust since medicine was practiced. However and interestingly enough, some concepts and definitions on the occurrence have survived for millennia. Once encountered as an issue, traumatic or non-traumatic paraplegia needs a multidisciplinary approach and a careful staging of the problem. Different scales are available with Frankel's and American Spinal Injury Association most widely used as alternatives or complementary tools. The authors discuss therapeutic options with a special focus on the stem cell therapy which has seen an impressive increase on the number of trials for a successful treatment. Sourcing and yielding of stem cells are made possible through a number of techniques, with material aspirated from bone marrow or adipose tissue, which are used along with other sources of neuronal precursors such as olfactory ensheathing cells. Nevertheless, large and multicenter studies are still lacking. However, with the quality of the ongoing work and research, the optimistic attitude seems warranted. Meanwhile, other rehabilitation and medical care interventions, always at hand, need to be applied in every individual suffering from paraplegia and spinal cord injury.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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