Question

How does inflammation and the resulting edema from a spinal cord injury temporaily impair neuronal activity and make it difficult to determine if a person has permanent loss of function due to the injury?

Answer 1

The spinal cord damage is happening in two phases. Those are

1. Injury of initial mechanical insult
2. Injury to nervous tissue due to the primary insult

When a spinal cord injury is occuring , the vascular epithelial cells of spinal cord blood vessels are getting damaged.As a result of this mechanical injury , the vasoactive substances will be damaged. Eg : nitric oxide.

It will lead to an extravasation of the plasma protienswhich causes eema of the spinal cord.

The inflammation occurs after an injury is commonly known as the post traumatic inflammatory response.

The spinal cord is connected to the brain and which contains many nerves helps to convey the messages from the braibn to all over the body parts and from the body parts to the brain.The brain controls all the functions of the body.

Hence, the spinal injury will lead to loss of functions which is very difficult to determine.Because it contains many minute nerves.And also it is very difficult to identify which nerve has been damagedor affected.