Spinal cord injuries, infections, and inflammatory diseases can cause severe pain and disability.
While some recovery is possible, scientists are exploring the best ways to stimulate the regrowth and healing of damaged nerves.
At the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science (VUIIS), researchers are focusing on white matter, a less studied part of the brain and spinal cord.
Their findings could lead to new treatments that restore nerve function using targeted electromagnetic stimuli or drugs.
The spinal cord, like the brain, has gray matter (nerve cell bodies) that process sensations and control movements.
It also contains white matter (axons), which are fibers connecting nerve cells and sending signals throughout the body.
A recent study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Anirban Sengupta, Ph.D., John Gore, Ph.D., and their team, found strong signals from white matter in the spinal cord when it responds to stimuli, similar to signals from gray matter.
“In the spinal cord, the white matter signal is quite large and detectable, unlike in the brain, where it has less amplitude than the gray matter signal,” said Sengupta, a research instructor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
This difference might be due to the larger volume of white matter in the spinal cord compared to the brain. It could also reflect the critical role of white matter in supporting gray matter.
For several years, Gore and his team have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect blood oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) signals, a key marker of nervous system activity, in white matter. They previously reported that when people perform tasks like wiggling their fingers during brain scans, BOLD signals increase in white matter.
In this study, researchers monitored changes in BOLD signals in the white matter of the spinal cord at rest and in response to a finger stimulus in an animal model. They found that white matter activity was higher in tracts of ascending fibers that carry signals from the spine to the brain.
This result aligns with white matter’s known function. White matter contains glial cells that regulate blood flow and neurotransmitters, the molecules that transmit signals between nerve cells.
Understanding the function of white matter in the spinal cord is still a work in progress. However, these findings may improve our knowledge of diseases affecting spinal cord white matter, like multiple sclerosis.
“We will be able to see how activity in the white matter changes in different stages of the disease,” Sengupta said. Researchers might also monitor the effectiveness of treatments, including neuromodulation, in promoting recovery after spinal cord injuries.
Sengupta earned his doctorate at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi in 2018 and joined Vanderbilt in 2024 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at VUIIS. Gore is a University Distinguished Professor with multiple academic appointments at Vanderbilt. Other co-authors of the study include Arabinda Mishra, Feng Wang, Ph.D., and Li Min Chen, MD, Ph.D.
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