Why Spinal Injuries (Even Minor Ones) Are Next To Impossible To Completely Fix.

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Why Spinal Injuries (Even Minor Ones) Are Next To Impossible To Completely Fix.

In: Biology

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The peripheral nervous system has an intrinsic ability for repair and regeneration, the central nervous system is, for the most part, incapable of self-repair and regeneration. There is currently no treatment for recovering human nerve function after injury to the central nervous system.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because the spinal cord is made of tons of nerve fibers. And nerves either don’t repair themselves or do so very slowly. It’s likely that all over the body, but the spinal cord is like the highway where all nerves meet and go to the brain. You damage that highway, and nothing works right

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Any central nervous system injury is very hard to recover from because neurons don’t get replaced for the most part and when connections are severed, it’s very hard to have some recovery. It can happen tho, some people depending on the injury can have a very good recovery.

Easily put, it’s like your spinal cord is a major series of highway between two cities : your brain and your body, and informations like body position, motricity and sucj are cars on the roads.. During an injury, imagine a bomb dropping from wherever the fuc it came from and exploding on one of the highway and completely blocking the road : The connection is severed, the information cannot pass between the two cities.

So you have two big problems :

1 -> The road is fucked. You need a new one. Theorically, it’s not that hard to rebuild.

2 -> The explosion provoked a massive fire (inflammation) that will spread everywhere on the remaining roads if not contained : That’s number 1 priority.

SO you have firemen (immune system) and their buddies police officers (glial cells, others cells in the brain than neurons, they are essential for maintaining a good neuronal environment) coming to the site of injury. The fireman try to put out the fire and the police officers completely block the road and tell every road maintenance guy to fuck off and to repair the road later.

But the situation is critical, and the fire is so big, that firemeen only have one option with the help of police officers, you need to condemn the road by building a massive sort of sarcophage around the highway that contains the fire. So that’s what they do, they clean up what they can clean up, build a sarcophage (glial scaring) and thus the fire do not spread but the road is completely condemned and cannot be repaired.

That’s essentially why spinal injuries suck. The road is never repaired in order to kill the fire in order to avoid spreading the injury. The road tho never gets repaired because the sarcophage cannot be dismantled.

That’s a necessary evil action of the body. And keep in mind that even though rebuilding a new road is possible, the road maintenance guys are not the brightest and could possibly rebuild something wrong instead of the original road, that’s also what your body tries to avoid by not repairing the injury.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Take one strand of overcooked spaghetti noodle. Break it. Now put it back together. Not so bad. That’s a nerve in your arm.

Now take a whole fistful of overcooked spaghetti noodles. Rip those in half. Now reconnect them to the correct noodles without mushing any other noodle up. And do it while still holding them in your fist. That’s your spine.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Essentially, in the spinal cord, a permanent “scab” forms on the end of the severed nerve still connected to the brain, so that’s why it’s so difficult to repair.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Imagine you work maintenance at a google server hall. Imagine there’s a room there where all the network cables go. Spanning across this room is the “main cable”. Let’s say this cable is 1 meter diamater, and consists of 25 000 network cables connecting computers with the servers. Now, undo the zip ties holding this bundle together so it isn’t so neat.

Okay, so one morning you learn that someone has gone into this room with a giant axe and just gone to town on the main cable. Your manager says *Nothing is working here! Could you go out there and put the cables back together?*

So you have a room with 25000 network cables(oh and they all have the same color), where 17000 of them have been chopped off. Not cleanly either, some are chopped in two places so that many pieces are lying on the floor unconnected to anything. How would you go about fixing this?

The answer is of course scrap all of it, buy a new cable and reconnect it all from scratch. IRL that means making a baby and killing yourself, basically, which maybe isn’t the ideal solution lol

Anonymous 0 Comments

Many of the nerves in the spinal cord are very, very long. A single neuron way up by your head can have an axon that goes all the way to the bottom of your spinal cord (not all of them are this long, but you get the idea).

If it’s axon gets cut in two, the parts can’t reattach. The neuron would have to regrow the long axon, which would require a ton of energy and resources, and time.

The neurons in the spinal cord (and brain) can’t grow back once they’re damaged for a few reasons:
1) they’re not designed to grow back very well. Scientists have found ways to encourage them to grow better, but not nearly well enough to cure spinal cord injuries.
2) When the spinal cord (or brain) is injured, a type of scar forms. This scar *might* actively block axons from re-growing (but this is a point of debate).
3) even if the axon grows some, it no longer has a way to know *where* it should go, or who it should connect to. So there’s a low chance of the neuron being able to do its job anymore.

Fun fact: other animals, such as fish and some reptiles/amphibians, can recover from spinal cord injuries. Scientists are studying how they do it!

Anonymous 0 Comments

A bunch of pretty little strings live in your back called nerves. They’re like the hair on your heads! These cool strings pull on your arms or legs and make them go DOO DOO-DOO DOO-DOO!!! But when the strings get cut you can’t go doo doo-doo doo-doo anymore. A spinal injury is when your back strings get cut.