X-Message-Number: 24143 Date: Mon, 24 May 2004 08:19:02 -0400 From: Subject: Hope for Alcor "Neuros" and James Swayze Below is an excerpt. The entire story is at: http://www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-hsspin243817034may24,0,2362681.story?coll=ny-health-headlines SPINAL CORD STUDY Therapy shows promise Three-pronged treatment in rats with lower spine injuries provides surprisingly impressive results BY JAMIE TALAN STAFF WRITER May 24, 2004 People with spinal cord injuries may one day regain the use of their limbs with a cocktail of treatments that proved extremely beneficial in rats with damaged cords, researchers say. When tested two months after the three-pronged treatment, the animals, with lower spine injuries that damaged their hind legs, had more improvement than the scientists had ever seen. They walked 70 percent better than injured animals that did not have the combination treatment. The study was designed by scientists at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis and included three therapies: A medicine initially developed for depression; transplantation of Schwann cells that make myelin, the protective covering around axons, which are the long projections attached to cells that allow communication to take place throughout the body; and a medicine that increases the production of a messenger molecule called c-AMP. C-AMP signals genes to carry out specific functions. Together, these treatments protected against further damage after the cord injury and allowed new axons to grow farther than expected. The study results appear this week in Nature Medicine. Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=24143