High blood sugar could worsen effects of spinal injury
Reducing glucose levels seems to help patients regain motor control
By Nathan Seppa
Controlling blood sugar in people with spinal cord injuries might aid in recovery and improve their movement and sensory functions. If such trauma patients arrive in emergency rooms with high blood glucose, they fare worse on average than those with normal levels, Japanese researchers find. And in lab tests, mice with spinal cord damage recover faster if their high blood glucose is regulated with insulin within eight hours of the injury, the team reports in the Oct. 1 Science Translational Medicine.
The findings should clear the way for a study in which patients with a spinal cord injury are randomly assigned to standard care or that care plus lowering of blood glucose if needed, says Greet Van den Berghe, a physician and critical care researcher at the University of Leuven, also called KU Leuven, in Belgium. “This is very promising and definitely worthwhile,” she says.