Spinal Cord Injury

There was broken glass and debris everywhere, and I could hear sirens in the distance. Just moments before I was sleeping in the car as we drove home from a family vacation in Florida. I was jolted awake as the car flipped over, and I could feel myself being thrown around as if I were in a washing machine. I was strangely calm, lying half in and half out of the backseat - until the paramedic checked me for injuries and I couldn't feel anything. I began to panic. When I asked if I was paralyzed, he wouldn't answer.

More than 25,000 children will be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders this year a number greater than AIDS, diabetes, and cancer combined yet so many aspects of the disorder remain a mystery. Is its cause genetic, environmental, or some combination of factors? Are dietary changes and drugs the best hope for treatment, or should the focus remain solely on behavioral interventions?

As she typed the words into the Internet search engine, Loretta McRae knew it was a long shot. In the months since the 15-year-old struck her head on an ocean sandbar in Australia, sustaining a C6 level spinal cord injury, virtually every expert said she'd already gotten her miracle. She was alive, she could wiggle her toes, she was regaining sensation in her limbs.

Loss of bone density is a concern commonly associated with the elderly, for whom a simple stumble can easily result in a painful, debilitating fracture. But a variety of other conditions can make low bone density a lifetime challenge, one best addressed as early as possible.

For someone who has been paralyzed from the neck down, the idea of ever walking again, driving a car or even doing something as simple as giving a friend a hug probably seems like a distant dream.

For years, people who suffered spinal cord injuries were told that the first six months of their recovery would paint an accurate picture of how they would live the rest of their lives. If a patient recovered any movement, it would probably be in those first few months and, nearly all experts believed, improvement after two years was impossible.

(Baltimore, MD) - Kennedy Krieger Institute today opens the doors of its International Center for Spinal Cord Injury, the world's first center focused on rehabilitation and restoration for children with paralysis. The Center's director, Dr. John McDonald, was the lead neurologist whose pioneering techniques helped the late actor Christopher Reeve to regain significant movement and sensation. The same novel therapies that produced remarkable results in Reeve will be applied to children at the new Center.