But in the early 1980s McGill University researcher Albert Aguayo showed that rat spinal nerves would grow like crazy inside a piece of peripheral nerve that was grafted onto the spine.
It may also place pressure on tendons, nerves and spinal discs located in your neck.
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Right now, there are researchers all over the world looking to heal spinal cord injuries by regenerating the nerves that were damaged.
This advance allows them to create a 3-D model of intact spinal tissue to determine whether the nerves are regenerating or not.
Multiple sclerosis is an illness that affects the nerves in the brain and spinal cord causing problems with muscle movement, balance and vision.
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Tysabri, which is infused monthly, was approved in 2004 and is more effective than other drugs at preventing MS relapses that destroy the connections between nerves in the brain and spinal cord.
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The soft palate is controlled by cranial nerves in other words, nerves that do not pass through the spinal cord.
In the late 1980s a young neuroscientist named Martin Schwab, now a professor at the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, suspected the culprit was the spinal cord's myelin, the insulating sheath that surrounds nerves.
So spinal damage, a common cause of paralysis, does not affect these nerves.
Arya had spinal muscular atrophy, or SMA, a progressive and fatal disease in which the nerves that control the muscles slowly waste away.
One problem this research faces is that in order to determine whether the nerves are regenerating, they have to actually cut out a piece of spinal and then cut that into ultra-thin slices, which are then placed under a microscope.
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