After a devastating spinal cord injury, mice’s nerve cells balloon up in size. Some of these neurons stay swollen longer than expected and begin to die, a study published September 25 in Science Translational Medicine shows. A drug that brought this swelling down improved the mice’s recovery, though it’s not yet known if the approach would work in people.
Until now, the details of neuron swelling in the spinal cord weren’t clear, says Bo Chen, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. “We didn’t know how long [the cells stay swollen], or if they’re going to die,” he says. “We were guessing.”
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