ChinaSCINet Update

[paolocipolla]

Jesus Paolo, would you quit your rude pointless arguments and let it go??? For the past weeks your posts just annoys me and your quotes just confuses everybody here, wasting peoples time with pointless remarks just because you don’t understand –or- pretending not to understand blaming someone else just to look smarter… stop your whining and LET IT GO, pal! To me you contribute nothing useful here in this forum.

By you to understand something or not, nobody's going to get cured by you so don't expect a diploma by the mail. Let the pros do their work.

Meanwhile, go get 'pissed off' and cry somewhere else, your attitude is unbearable.


CIAO

Moe,

be nicer!

you can experess your desagreement with what I post, but you can also ignore what I post.

Paolo

[paolocipolla]

[QUOTE=Wise Young;1623654]

Paolo,

Yes, you seem to have gotten the explanation right. I should clarify that I reported that some patients are showing improvements in locomotion scores without significant increases in their motor scores, which reflect voluntary motor strength of legs. To explain this, I said that "the patients appear to be able to activate their central pattern generators without increasing their voluntary motor control or strength." I don't think that I said that people are walking without any voluntary movement. Certainly, that was not my intent.

It is all right if you don't believe my explanation of the phenomenon. If you are interested, there is ample evidence in the literature of people who are walking through activation of the central pattern generator. If you watch the youtube of Reggie Edgerton's lecture posted by Grammy earlier, he actually shows a person doing "air walking" with stimulation of the central pattern generator. However, you will have to wait until we publish the study to see all the data from our study and decide for yourself. I hope, of course, that our subjects will show improved motor and sensory scores on followup examinations. Six months may still be too early. Thanks.

http://spinalcordresearchandadvocacy...otor-function/

Wise.

Thank you Wise,

I hope that when you will publish the data you will make available also videos of the people "walking".

Paolo

[paolocipolla]

Idk if this is the wrong place to ask this, but I recent found out the my t10 burst fracture was more than a contusion. Appearently the bone exploded inwards into the spinal cord(maybe severing it idk how bad). And from what I understand these trials are only for contusion. Is there any way to fix both contusion and penetration injuries or is it a lost cause?

Even contusions have often a cavity that many researchers agree that needs to be filled in with something.
There are many scaffolds under development that could do the job or periferial nerve transpant seems to be a very good (if not better) option as well.

Paolo

[crabbyshark]

Dr. Wise,

Have the researchers investigated the safety/efficacy of the UCBMC+MP and lithium treatment in the lab on animals with incomplete injuries?

[Lyerly]

Moe,

be nicer!

you can experess your desagreement with what I post, but you can also ignore what I post.

Paolo

Your right it would be better if he or anyone else would ignore you but since you have done it 1000000000000000 times it becomes hard to do so. Also since Wise is nice enough he amazingly responds to what you say so you are going to see your stuff quoted in his posts.

[Jawaid]

Wise can you consider lumbar injury patients in your phase3 trial or for lumbosacral you have separate trial? If you can see some white growth then why dont u try lumbosacral patients?

[Ruben]

If a volunteer of a clinical trial receive the placebo treatment, will he receive at the end of the trial the "real" treatment, the same for example if a volunteer of the planned us trial receive ucbmc+lthium+mp can he receive at the end the treatment with cethrin?
Other question, the period of phase 1 for safety is sufficiently long to see if there is no risk of tumors if the cells continue to proliferate?

[Wills77]

Dr.Young - I'm curious about muscle spasms.
Have the patients noticed any difference in their tone/muscle spasms? Enough to ween off of baclofen or any kind of muscle relaxers?

Lately My spasms have been getting so bad (currently on 80mg a day) that I'm considering a baclofen pump. If I do get one. will that affect my chances of being chosen for upcoming trials?

[lunasicc42]

Dr.Young - I'm curious about muscle spasms.
Have the patients noticed any difference in their tone/muscle spasms? Enough to ween off of baclofen or any kind of muscle relaxers?

Lately My spasms have been getting so bad (currently on 80mg a day) that I'm considering a baclofen pump. If I do get one. will that affect my chances of being chosen for upcoming trials?

Good question. I have a baclofan pump... Does that make any difference?

[havok]

Even contusions have often a cavity that many researchers agree that needs to be filled in with something.
There are many scaffolds under development that could do the job or periferial nerve transpant seems to be a very good (if not better) option as well.

Paolo

I didnt think much progress was being made with scaffolds? Also who was doing periferial nerve transplants?

[crabbyshark]

Searching for Miracles

"We get too little from medical innovation because we expect too much."

The New York Times reports on a remarkable trial of a new gene-based therapy for leukemia, which reprograms the patient's own immune system to fight the rogue cells. The results have been nothing short of remarkable:

Three adults with chronic leukemia treated at the University of Pennsylvania have also had complete remissions, with no signs of disease; two of them have been well for more than two years, said Dr. David Porter. Four adults improved but did not have full remissions, and one was treated too recently to evaluate. A child improved and then relapsed. In two adults, the treatment did not work at all. The Pennsylvania researchers were presenting their results on Sunday and Monday in Atlanta at a meeting of the American Society of Hematology.

"Despite the mixed results," the story goes on, "cancer experts not involved with the research say it has tremendous promise, because even in this early phase of testing it has worked in seemingly hopeless cases."

"Mixed results?" These are fantastic results. Twelve people were treated for end-stage, multi-drug resistant leukemia; one third are in full remission. More than one third have at least slowed the progress of their disease. These are people who had one foot, and the toes on the other foot, in the grave. Even if this is only a temporary respite, it's a major success.

It strikes me that medical research is haunted by the memory of penicillin, and the other antibiotics that immediately followed. For a period of ten or fifteen years, "miracle cures" were the stuff of everyday life rather than television movies and late night infomercials: you took a pill, and something that had previously been fatal, like pneumonia or tuberculosis, simply went away. Often, you went from death's door to the picture of health in hours or days.

As a consequence, people think that this is how medical discoveries are supposed to work: you find a cure for a fatal or crippling disease, everyone gets better instantly, and the world is a better place. I suspect that this is Big Pharma critic Marcia Angell's mental model. The reason she's decided that drug companies are about as useful as a third buttock is that they're no longer delivering the miracle pills on schedule.

But this is not how innovation works most of the time. Innovation is not "Problem solved forever!" Instead it's mostly "We've reduced the incidence of this problem by 11.3%." But if you do that over and over again, eventually you can produce a pretty good fascimile of the miracle cure you thought you were supposed to get in the first place.

Unfortunately, Penicillin Envy can make it difficult to achieve those lesser innovations. A while back, Michael Mandel pointed out that the FDA frequently makes the perfect the enemy of the "needs improvement"--and thereby kills promising technologies. A company that developed a computer system for diagnosing melanoma was turned down on the grounds that it didn't do as good a job as the best dermatologists. Of course, not everyone has access to the best dermatologists--and more importantly, there's no reason to think that the first-generation system will do as good a job as the eighth generation. But if you kill the first generation, you also kill the eighth.

The FDA eventually reversed itself, but the mentality remains. We expect too many miracle cures, and as a result, we get fewer medical miracles.

The Daily Beast

[Geoman]

"We get too little from medical innovation because we expect too much."

An interesting point of view. Thanks for posting.

Clayton

[Brad]

There are two reasons for excluding ASIA B and C patients from the trials. The first is that transplanting cells into the spinal cord may jeopardize surviving axons that are crossing the injury site. The second is that ASIA B and C subjects have better prognoses for recovery than ASIA A subjects. The second reason is not applicable to people with chronic spinal cord injury. I may be able to convince my colleagues to include patients with sacral sparing and no other motor or sensory function in the lower limbs. We shall see


I was under the impression the surgery required was already proven safe in China and "better prognoses" is a good thing. Aren't those two factors enough to expand the inclusion criteria in at least a few people who understand the risk?

Brad

[crabbyshark]

"Cells Harvested From Human Urine Used To Make Stem Cells"

Anyone recall Dr. Wise mentioning this in the June open house? via Wired

Biologists in China have published a study detailing how they transformed common cells found in human urine into neural stem cells that can be used to create neurons and glial brain cells. The find holds huge potential for the rapid testing and development of new treatments for neurodegenerative disorders.

Prediction: When the Kunming results are finally released to the public this month they will be a headline story on the evening news, front page of cnn.com, trending on Twitter, upvoted on reddit, and covered by sites like Huffington Post.

[corinne4cure]

[QUOTE=Wise Young;1623654]

Paolo,

Yes, you seem to have gotten the explanation right. I should clarify that I reported that some patients are showing improvements in locomotion scores without significant increases in their motor scores, which reflect voluntary motor strength of legs. To explain this, I said that "the patients appear to be able to activate their central pattern generators without increasing their voluntary motor control or strength." I don't think that I said that people are walking without any voluntary movement. Certainly, that was not my intent.

It is all right if you don't believe my explanation of the phenomenon. If you are interested, there is ample evidence in the literature of people who are walking through activation of the central pattern generator. If you watch the youtube of Reggie Edgerton's lecture posted by Grammy earlier, he actually shows a person doing "air walking" with stimulation of the central pattern generator. However, you will have to wait until we publish the study to see all the data from our study and decide for yourself. I hope, of course, that our subjects will show improved motor and sensory scores on followup examinations. Six months may still be too early. Thanks.

http://spinalcordresearchandadvocacy...otor-function/

Wise.

Dear Wise,
One more question: if I understood correctly, there was a comparison between people who got the treatment only, and some other group who received both the treatment + locomotor training in Kunming.
What about comparing people who had treatment only to people who received locomotor training only? has this been done ?

If I remember well, you have always been quite positive about the intensive locomotor training given in Kunming. What I am trying to figure out through this question is whether the treatment has (so far) influenced the ambulation capabilities of patients in combination with locomotor training, or whether that progress was only or mainly due to intensive locomotor training itself.

I understand it is too early for any conclusion and further functional progress might still happen should the white matter growth lead to actual new connections and regained motor control, but I am just trying to understand the current results better.

thanks a lot in advance for your explanations. Corinne