BACKGROUND: Until now, it is still difficult to find a good method for the treatment of sports spinal cord injury. With the development of stem cells technology, stem cells for the treatment of spinal cord injury have a strong potential.
OBJECTIVE: To investigate the effect of stem cells transplantation, stem cells nutritional factors and genetically modified stem cells on the treatment of spinal cord injury.
METHODS: PubMed database, Wanfang database and Weipu database were used to search the research articles relate to stem cells transplantation, stem cells nutritional factors and genetically modified stem cells on the treatment of spinal cord injury from 1987 to 2010 in English and from 1997 to 2010 in Chinese, respectively. The key words were “stem cells, transplantation, neurotrophic factor, sports spinal cord injury, rehabilitation” in English and in Chinese. A total of 37 articles were selected to review after the repetitive and old articles were excluded.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Based on stem cells transplantation possess, mobility, self-renewal and multi-differentiation potential and other advantages, the stem cells technology in the rehabilitation of spinal cord injury in sports has become inevitable. However, as a variety of cytokines and genes were involved in the regulation during the repair of spinal cord injury in sports, the basic mechanisms was unclear yet. So the in-depth study of the function of stem cells transplantation, induced differentiation mechanism, gene therapy and nutritional factors were needed to be done.