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椐HealthDay２月２０日消息, 美国专家说他们在研究损伤神经纤维再生方面取得了重大发展，采用联合治疗,“双管齐下”促生长。
波士顿儿童医院和哈佛医学院的研究员说, 这种新治疗法结合了激发神经细胞自然成长治疗法与减少成长抑制因素作用基因治疗法。采用此联合治疗法，神经纤维再生程度是原来治疗法的三倍。研究结果详见２月18日的神经科期刊。
研究人员已在老鼠损伤的视觉神经上做过实验。
“我们把两种治疗法相结合――激活神经细胞的生长和消除抑制成长作用――结果发现再生程度惊人。”儿童医院神经科研究负责人拉里·贝诺维兹说。
再生程度虽然不能让老鼠的视力完全恢复，但已是单纯采用激发生长因素治疗的三倍。
贝诺维兹说他们将继续实验，尝试治疗损伤视觉神经以恢复视力。
“我们必须完善这种新治疗法，而且我们已经知道怎么做了。但是这里还有一个难题。” 贝诺维兹说。
这就是如何把视觉神经纤维连接到大脑的准确位置，这样才能获得清晰的视觉图象。
“这是个映射问题，我们必须准确处理神经纤维投影至大脑的问题。” 贝诺维兹说。
附原文
Science Inches Closer to Regenerating Sight
FRIDAY, Feb. 20 (HealthDayNews) -- Using a two-pronged approach to encouraging growth, American scientists say they've made an important advance in regenerating damaged nerve fibers.
A combination of activating nerve cells' natural growth state and using gene therapy to mute the effects of growth-inhibiting factors let them achieve about three times more nerve fiber regeneration than previous attempts, say researchers at Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School (news - web sites). Results appear in the Feb. 18 Journal of Neuroscience.
The experiments were conducted on the damaged optic nerves of rats.
"When we combined these two therapies -- activating the growth program in nerve cells and
overcoming the inhibitory signaling -- we got very dramatic regeneration," Dr. Larry Benowitz, director of neuroscience research at Children's Hospital, says in a prepared statement.
The amount of regeneration wasn't enough to restore the rats' vision. But it was about triple the amount of regeneration achieved by stimulating growth factors alone.
Benowitz says his lab will continue trying to repair damaged optic nerves to restore vision.
"We have to fine-tune the system, and we have some ideas of how to do it," Benowitz says. "But then we come to another big hurdle."
That hurdle is getting the optic nerve fibers to link up to the correct areas in the brain in a way that visual images don't get scrambled.
"It's a mapping problem," Benowitz says. "We have to retain the proper organization of fiber projections to the brain.
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