When individuals are involved in motor vehicle accidents, work-related accidents and significant accidents of any other kind, they can suffer devastating injuries. One particularly catastrophic injury that accident victims can suffer is a spinal cord injury. Much like traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries can be costly, can require significant medical treatment and can ultimately impact every aspect of an individual’s life.
A recent study has shed critical light on the ways in which spinal cord injuries can impact an individual’s body in the most basic ways. This new information will almost certainly help to inform how spinal cord patients are treated in the immediate aftermath of their accidents. Experts based at the University College London, University Hospital Balgrist and University of Zurich have determined that accident victims suffer irreversible loss of tissue within 40 days of sustaining injury.
Understanding the time period by which they have to work before irreversible tissue loss occurs will hopefully inspire physicians to behave proactively on behalf of spinal cord injury patients within the first four or five weeks post-injury. Once this tissue loss has occurred, the structural integrity and functional state of both the brain and spinal cord will be changed irrevocably.
Victims who have suffered acute spinal cord injuries are often given access to beneficial physical therapy, healing drugs and other promising therapies. However, understanding the extent to which the body of an accident victim changes and how quickly it changes in the aftermath of an accident is key to developing even more targeted and promising therapies in the future. This recent study will hopefully aid the medical community in doing just that.
Source: Science Daily, “Irreversible Tissue Loss Seen Within 40 Days of Spinal Cord Injury,” July 2, 2013