Repair spinal cord injury in mice successfully

Scientists have spent decades trying to find a method to regenerate nerve connections that are damaged when a spinal cord injury. A group of U.S. researchers has successfully tested a new recipe in mice, although they are cautious about its future application in humans.
The key just to present the pages of the journal Nature Neuroscience is an enzyme known as PTEN, old ally in the fight against diseases such as cancer.
PTEN is a 'switch' that remains off during embryonic development, allowing the proliferation and division of cells that will give rise to the whole organism. However, when growth is complete, the switch is 'light' to fulfill its mission: to inhibit the mTOR pathway and cause the cells cease to regenerate.
Zhiger I, a neurologist at Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard University (both in the U.S.), he asked her again off PTEN in rats with spinal cord injury, could be achieved by new cell regeneration sufficient to restore the broken connections. And his experiments with laboratory rodents showed him that the answer was affirmative, and the animals re-establishing some lost motor functions due to a spinal cord injury (with levels that had never been seen before ").

Although his therapy could provide a pathway for the treatment of paralysis, He is cautious about the potential for regeneration of nerve connections in patients with flesh and blood, because they still have to investigate the method of achieving off PTEN without undesirable side effects. Although it concluded that their research shows that "reactivating the mTOR pathway allows adult neurons to recover some of the growth capacity of neurons themselves younger. This 'rejuvenation' could become a successful strategy for various types of injuries and trauma affecting the central nervous system. "

What's behind the violence and addiction

Specialists say they can only be manifestations of a depressive state. Why depression is a "social epidemic" and how they treat traditional medicine and alternative therapies.


The newspaper now faces Argentines to different manifestations of violence: at home, in the street, at school, at work. Physical or verbal abuse, was found in almost all activities of daily life. In some cases, an underlying addictive behavior, and not just drugs or alcohol. For example, the mistreatment of employees of a superior workaholic.
However, both violence and addiction can only be a manifestation of much deeper psychological picture: depression. "Indeed, not only depression symptoms manifest themselves known by almost everyone: insomnia, sadness, eating disorders, hopelessness, and so on. In what is called 'masked depression' classic manifestations are absent and irritable people may occur, violent, with addictive tendencies. What often underlies depression is a picture that is not presented in a 'classic' "he said to Hugo Infobae.com Lerner, vice president of the Foundation for the Study of Depression (Fundep).

Then there would be a not so forced relationship between violence, addiction and depressive. This would say that a person suffering from depression is not isolated from its surroundings, as popular belief would indicate, and even has a direct influence on it. "Unable to think about depression as an entity away from the socio-historical context," said categorically the specialist, and called for understanding "most comprehensive human suffering, which exceeds the biochemical and biological explanations.

For Lerner, the depression is then a "social epidemic", which runs at a rapid pace in Argentina and the world and is in intimate connection with everything around it. That is why the obstacles facing the construction of the identity of the "subject argentino" when trying to implement projects to achieve equilibrium play a central role when a fall or no depressive symptoms.

"For a huge majority, Argentina has become a major area of quicksand, with no firm ground to support it. For someone to be integrated into their environment and become subject, must have a stable and predictable. If the surrounding social environment is fluid, unstable and unpredictable it is unthinkable that a person can become a free subject of changes in self-esteem, "explained the expert.

He added: "We should only look at the convulsions that have gone through and probably find other significant correlations between increasing demand for clinical depression, subjects apathetic, hopeless and a society with social crises, lack of credibility in political leadership, violence, unemployment, feelings of social dislocation, inability of many subjects to imagine a future, assembling a project. "

"Depression, subjects hopeless, apathetic, sad they have been mounted to stay for unpredictable weather," Lerner concluded.