Prognosis in plain sight
Researchers can predict success for patients with upper-spine injuries
Image courtesy of Dario Pfyffer
A simple measurement taken from standard MRI images can accurately predict the extent to which a patient with neck-level spinal cord injuries will recover, according to a study by researchers at Stanford Medicine and several other universities and hospitals in the U.S. and Europe.
The findings were reported in June 2024 in The Lancet Neurology.
Of spinal cord injuries, those that occur at neck level are among the most devastating, and recovery is difficult to predict. Some patients live with lasting paralysis of all four limbs, while others regain the ability to walk.
The width of spared spinal cord tissue at the injury site allowed researchers to project a patient’s improvement on tests of motor and sensory function, the study reported.
“Our model can tell you, depending on how many millimeters of tissue that’s spared, how much function they’re likely to gain during a follow-up period of three months or 12 months,” said Dario Pfyffer, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford Medicine and lead author of the study.
Such insights will not only aid clinicians in counseling patients and choosing treatments and rehabilitation approaches but will also help researchers sort patients into groups with similar recovery potential — a critical first step in testing experimental therapies for spinal cord injuries, Pfyffer said.
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