There is currently no standard pharmacological treatment for spinal cord injury. Here, Dr. Florencia Labombarda, who comes from Buenos Aires University, Argentina suggests that progesterone, a steroid hormone, may be a promising therapeutical candidate as it is already for traumatic brain injury, where it has reached phase II clinical trials. We rely on previous works showing anti-inflammatory, neuroprotective and promyelinating roles for progesterone after spinal cord injury and in our recent paper, in which we demonstrate that progesterone diminishes lesion, preserves white matter integrity and improves locomotor recovery in a clinically relevant model of spinal cord lesion.This is sure to be an exciting area of research in myelination regenerative therapy. The relevant study has been published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 15, 2014).
Article
"Give progesterone a chance " by Florencia Labombarda1,2, Daniel Garcia-Ovejero3 (1 Laboratory of Neuroendocrine Biochemistry, Institute of Biology and Experimental Medicine CONICET, Vuelta de Obligado 2490, Buenos Aires, Argentina; 2 Departament of Human Biochemistry, School of Medicine, Buenos Aires University, Paraguay 2155, Buenos Aires, Argentina; 3 Neuroinflammation Laboratory, National Hospital For Paraplegics, (SESCAM), Toledo, Spain)
Labombarda F, Garcia-Ovejero D. Give progesterone a chance. Neural Regen Res. 2014;9(15):1422-1424.