HEALTHHopeful movement: progress in spinal cord injury treatmentAdvances in the understanding of nerve regeneration are leading to quality-of-life improvements but are also raising new issues for these patients' primary care physicians.By Susan J. Landers, AMNews staff. June 2/9, 2003. Nowadays when people think of spinal cord injuries, they think of actor Christopher Reeve, who was paralyzed in a fall from a horse eight years ago. But there's also the woman who was injured in a car crash, the young shooting victim, the rangy teen who dove into the shallow end of the pool, or the man who fell from a ladder while cleaning his gutters. More than 200,000 people in the United States have spinal cord injuries and another 11,000 are injured each year, according to estimates made by the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. As trauma care advances, more and more of these patients are surviving their injuries. After they are discharged from rehabilitation hospitals, they likely will continue medical treatment with their primary care physicians. The good news is that thanks to a burst of recent research activity, there is more to offer them. "Over the course of the last 10 years, the knowledge and understanding about spinal cord injury has exploded, leading us not only to a better understanding of the pathology, but also to potential treatments and interventions for recovery," says Steven Kirshblum, MD, director of the spinal cord injury and ventilator program at Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in West Orange, N.J. Dr. Kirshblum is one of Reeve's physicians. With these advances come new challenges, for both physicians and patients. Because these patients are living longer, fuller lives, that gives rise to a second level of treatment concerns. [...]Full text of AMNews content is available to AMA members and paid subscribers.
Copyright 2003 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
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