We are light years away from the CP work being done just ten years ago. The new scientists are dazzling in their insight. They are going to help us.
It isn’t fair to put pressure on the PhD’s. They are doing the best they can. However, when we see a group of young scientists, such as Haines and his colleagues at Yale, under the leadership of Waxman, we have to pay tribute.
We celebrate to see their articles like the people in Auschwitz celebrated when they heard the rocketry and bombs of the Russians drawing near the camp. Liberation was a possibility.
We have already highlighted Jeffrey Coull’s article in Nature on the chloride ion and reviewed how inhibition of pain may be changed into excitation. We know how ion channels, the bent tubes which conduct electrically charged particles across the wall of the nerve cell membrane contain the answers to our plight. Chloride can be regarded as contributing to “priming” of the neuron, ie. getting the positive and negative charges lined up to get enough voltage difference across the membrane sufficient to generate a spike, or action potential when it is tweaked by a little current moving along the cell membrane.
Excitation however, is powered mainly by the sodium channels, which generate the current of the action potential, which is the voltage spike which runs along a pain nerve. The frequency of the spiking action potential determines the severity of the pain impulse.
Many sodium (Na) channels exist in the body. Bryan Hains et al, writing in 1 Oct 2003 in the Journal of Neuroscience has shown the voltage gated sodium channel 1.3 (Nav1.3) is greatly upregulated in SCI pain in rats AND blocking Nav1.3 decreases or eliminates the hypersensitivity of SCI injury. This has never been shown before. Most exciting of all, one of the brilliant authors of that group has agreed to provide a summary which will appear here in the future.
In the meantime, those of you near a library, copy the article and give it to your doctor. He will interpret it for you. Of particular interest are the findings regarding lamotrigine, since that is one of the anticonvulsants now available for treating CP. Again, this is not medical advice, just education. See your local doc for follow up and for medical advice.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to Yale and to its fantastically smart group of neuroscientists. We hear the explosions and we have hope. For some of us, that is really important. For all of us, we offer thanks to you and hope God will hold your lives and work precious.
