Abstract:

BACKGROUND: Tissue regeneration and functional recovery after spinal cord injury (SCI) have always been a significant challenge for neurosurgeon and rehabilitation physicians. For decades, a lot of animal experiments have confirmed that stem cell transplantation had certain repair effects on SCI, and had made many clinical trials, but did not obtain satisfactory effects.
OBJECTIVE: To review recent advances and problems in stem cell transplantation for SCI, so as to point the way for further studies, and to promote recovery of SCI patients.
METHODS: We retrieved articles about therapy of stem cell for SCI in Vip, Wanfang and PubMed databases for articles published from January 1990 to March 2010. The key words were “spinal cord injury, stem cells, transplantation, mechanism, clinical application” for retrieval in the title and abstracts. A total of 285 articles were primarily obtained, and 30 articles were included for this review in accordance with inclusion criteria and exclusion criteria.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: According to the inclusion and exclusion criteria, we got 30 articles. Through reading and collecting information, we summarized the basic mechanisms of stem cell transplantation for treating SCI, sources and selection of stem cells, transplantation methods, transplantation frequency and the clinical status, and put forward the problems at present. Stem cell transplantation for SCI is a great potential treatment, but some problems also exist. These problems will be the direction of further research addressing stem cell therapy for SCI.