Promising new research conducted by some, well, rather renegade scientists at Johns Hopkins suggests that MS may be reversible!

Promising research shows that intensive locomotor training in children can reverse disabling spinal cord injury.

A new report shows that a non-ambulatory (unable to walk or stand) child with a cervical spinal cord injury was able to restore basic walking function after intensive locomotor training. The case study, published in Physical Therapy (May 2008), the scientific journal of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA), evaluated the effects of locomotor training in a 4 ½ year-old-boy, who had no ability to walk following a gunshot wound sixteen months earlier.

Researchers at the University of Alabama Birmingham have been extensively testing the OtisKnee Custom Fit Knee Replacement system. In 19 of 25 users hospital stay was shortened significantly, and patients were walking unassisted within 6 weeks.

May 27, 2008 (Nice, France) — In the largest European stroke research program ever undertaken, countries in the European Union are joining forces in a unique effort to structure, integrate, and advance stroke research.

Announced at the recently held 17th European Stroke Conference, the initiative, which is known as the European Stroke Network (ESN), will receive €21 million over the next 5 years — funding that is over and above research initiatives supported at the national level individually by each of the 14 participating European Union member states.

An assistive robot, developed by an engineering graduate student at Florida Atlantic University, potentially offers better and more comprehensive physical therapy and rehabilitation. By developing a robot to perform the functions that would normally be undertaken by a human caregiver, Melissa Morris and Dr. Oren Masory, of FAU hope to drive down human resources costs so that therapy can be undertaken for a longer period of time, and also gather and record less subjective data about a patient’s progress via mathematical calculations of the patient’s range and strength of movement.

In one of the strangest, and most promising, things ever seen, a man has regrown almost an inch of finger with the use of what is being termed ‘pixie dust’. The BBC reports.

MONDAY, April 28 (HealthDay News) — Patients having decompression surgery within 24 hours of a cervical spinal cord injury may have a better outcome than those who have the procedure later, according to new research. Six months after surgery, 24 percent of the patients who had the surgery within 24 hours showed two-grade or greater improvement in their condition compared with only 4 percent in the group that had the surgery more than a day later.

While this can arguably be blamed on higher incidences of complications from diabetes and vascular issues, there is not a corresponding ratio of disease prevalence says a new study based in Illinois. Health insurance policies, medical care centers, and local medical staff should be carefully scrutinized.

Every year, nearly 12,000 individuals in the United States and Canada, mostly young adults, sustain a spinal cord injury (SCI). According to the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC), SCI costs an estimated $9.7 billion each year in the United States alone. Although there are some surgical interventions, such as decompression, which neurosurgeons administer to SCI patients after injury, these procedures have not dramatically improved overall recovery and outcome. “This is an area of medicine that has not seen tremendous scientific advances, so there remains an urgent need to improve upon current interventions to help restore neurological function in patients with acute SCI,” said Michael Fehlings, MD, PhD, FRCSC, FACS, head of the Krembil Neuroscience Center at the University Health Network in Toronto and professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Toronto.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Teams of university scientists backed by U.S. government funds hope to grow new skin, ears, muscles and other body tissue for troops injured in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Defense Department said on Thursday. “We’ve had just over 900 people, men, some women with amputations of some kind or another since the start of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq,” said Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. Many have also suffered burns, spinal cord injuries and vision loss. “Getting these people up to where they are functioning and reintegrated, employed, able to help their families and be fully participating members of society, this is our task,” he said.