MANY people get back pain at some point in their lives. But some of us are unlucky enough to develop severe degenerative disc disease, which can be truly debilitating. Now it seems that disc transplants from dead donors could be used to treat the problem.
Spinal discs connect individual vertebrae and have a jelly-like centre that acts as a shock absorber. Over time, the discs can dehydrate and become less compressible, causing severe pain.
The usual treatment is painkillers and physical therapy. The last resort is spinal fusion, an operation in which two vertebrae are fused together, but this can lead to decreased mobility and degeneration of discs between nearby vertebrae.
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Keith Luk of the University of Hong Kong and Dike Ruan of the Naval General Hospital in Beijing, China, used donor discs to replace damaged ones in the neck regions of one woman and four men. Five years later, symptoms such as numbness, muscle weakness and stiffness of gait had improved in all the patients (The Lancet, vol 369, page 993).
Importantly, none of the patients had an immune response to the foreign tissue, even though immunosuppressive drugs were not used. 鈥淎natomically this is a special tissue. There is no blood supply to the centre of the disc bringing in immune cells,鈥� says Ruan.
