Left untreated, these cavities can cause excruciating pain and progressive loss of the sensory and motor capabilities. In the standard approach, the spinal hollows are drained through an implanted tube, but the tubes tend to get blocked, allowing the cysts to swell again and necessitating yet more surgery. The new techniques may promise a far better solution. During the experimental surgery, doctors first drain the syrinx and then inject it with spinal-cord cells taken from human embryos. Their hope is that these injected cells will grow to fill the drained cavity, patching the hole and somehow preventing it from refilling.
Preliminary results are encouraging.
Researchers at the University of Florida were cautiously optimistic after a July 11 spinal operation, the first of ten such surgeries to be performed there over the next four years. Neurosurgeon Scott P. Falci of the Craig Center for Spinal Cord Injury Research in Denver, Colo., is even more confident that fetal-cell grafts can obliterate the cysts and the threat they pose to neural function. In each case, he says, magnetic resonance imaging has shown that the grafted cells have indeed grown to fill in the cavity and are living stably within the host spinal cord. Surprisingly, the transplanted cells need not even be nerves or nerve progenitors. In 1994 Falci filled a cyst in the spinal cord of a quadriplegic with tissue taken from the patient's omentum, the fatty membrane that helps support internal organs.