The medical practice of trying to avoid scar formation at the site of a spinal cord injury may indeed not be correct. Every year approximately 12,500 American will suffer a spinal cord injury and an estimated 276,000 people in the US are suffering from long term effects related to this injury. For decades the prevailing medical dogma was that that scars were preventing neuronal regrowth across the injured area but a newly released study says it is actually the opposite that happens. Scar forming cells called astrocytes may actually help nerve regrowth. A study recently published in Nature and authored by Mark A. Anderson, Joshua E. Burda, Yilong Ren, Yan Ao, Timothy M. O’Shea, Riki Kawaguchi, Giovanni Coppola, Baljit S. Khakh, Timothy J. Deming& Michael V. Sofroniew found that “scars may be a bridge and not a barrier towards developing better treatments for paralyzing spinal cord injuries.”
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