Moving beyond the glial scar for spinal cord repair

By E. Bradbury, E. Burnside. Nature Communications, 2019

617 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Traumatic spinal cord injury results in severe and irreversible loss of function. The injury triggers a complex cascade of inflammatory and pathological processes, culminating in formation of a scar. While traditionally referred to as a glial scar, the spinal injury scar in fact comprises multiple cellular and extracellular components. This multidimensional nature should be considered when aiming to understand the role of scarring in limiting tissue repair and recovery. In this Review we discuss recent advances in understanding the composition and phenotypic characteristics of the spinal injury scar, the oversimplification of defining the scar in binary terms as good or bad, and the development of therapeutic approaches to target scar components to enable improved functional outcome after spinal cord injury. The scar formation that occurs following spinal cord injury has properties that are distinct to scars seen in other areas of the CNS, and in other tissues. Here the authors discuss the components of the spinal cord injury scar and how it can have both detrimental and positive roles in relation to recovery.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Molecular Biology, Pathology and Forensic Medicine

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bd35773be54f58377ce91c6c75a33cae19ce0178

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Citations in the corpus

• Spinal cord injury: molecular mechanisms and therapeutic interventions (2023, background): “Reactive astrocytes are highly heterogeneous, range from subtle and reversible alterations in gene expression and morphology to permanent astrocyte scar formation, depend on the distance from the injury and types of injury.(143,145,146) Though reactive astrocytes were long regarded as functional pas”