Brief Introduction to Spinal Cord Injury part 1

Hey guys I am back with another blog.

Now after my last post, it got me thinking I want to make this blog informative as well rather then just sharing my experiences only. So then, I thought to myself when I got injured, I knew nothing about Spinal cord injury or SCI as we say is it in short.

So in this blog I would like to give you a brief introduction on this topic, also as this is a very vast topic and if I start going into the details of it the post will become very lengthy and technical which I don’t want this blog to become a very technical and in depth as it just to brief you what SCI is. I would like to cover the following topics:

1. What is a Spinal Cord?
2.  What is Spinal Cord Injury?
3.  Classification in Spinal Cord Injury?
4.  What are two main types of paralysis in SCI?
5.  What is the recovery time and cure for SCI?

I guess it’s a lot to discuss so let’s get started 😊

Well whenever I meet someone new, the main question everybody asks is if you are having problem in your spine or backbone as we say here shouldn’t you be on bed and take rest rather then moving here and there on a wheelchair, stressing you back and what is the problem with your legs, why cannot you move them?

These are a few of the question I get asked by people. Let’s start with a very basic concept and the answer to my first question that is:

1. What is Spinal Cord?

Well spinal cord in general is like an electrical wire which connect your whole of the body with your brain which in turn controls it. It runs from the top of your brain through the Spinal Column or we can say the backbone. So spinal cord is a communication highway between the brain and rest of our body consisting of bundles of nerve cells and fibers as its road.

The Human Spinal Cord can be divided into 4 parts namely:

• Cervical area
• Thoracic area
• Lumber area
• Sacrum area

2. What is a Spinal Cord Injury?

When due to certain injury your spinal cord is damaged rendering certain parts of your body in non-working condition. The Spinal Cord Injury is abbreviated as SCI. It is broadly classified into two types namely:

• Complete Injury
• Incomplete Injury

Now the complete injuries are those injuries in which the spinal cord is fully severed or simply cut into two pieces resulting in loss functions of the region below the injured area.

Incomplete injuries are those injuries in which the spinal cord is partially severed or simply partially cut, allowing the person to retain some of the functions below the injured area. These injuries are becoming increasingly more common than the former due to better personal protective gear used by paramedics, better treatment availability and increased knowledge of how to respond to a suspected SCI in emergency.

3. Classification in SCI:

When a person gets injured with a spinal cord injury, you are given the spinal cord injury level according to the bony fracture or the vertebral level as well as the severity of the injury to the spinal cord underneath indicated as complete or incomplete injury. In addition to this a person may also be given classification according to the American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA), as ASIA A, B, C, D or E.

Let’s start with the first type of classification i.e. according to the bony fracture/ vertebral level. According to this type of classification we have 29 levels of Vertebral Injuries, they can be described as follows:

1. 7 levels of Cervical or Neck area
2. 12 levels of Thoracic or Chest area
3. 5 levels of Lumbar or Back area
4. 5 levels of Sacrum or Tail area

The second type of classification would be as already covered in point number 2 Incomplete and Complete injuries. As this was a very broad classification to tell about this injury, this third type came to elaborate more in terms of what is being controlled by the persons brain and what is not.

So, now about this third type. Let’s start by giving a brief history about this classification.

Now, doctors have been using a clinical scale to grade the severity of neurological loss. Before world war 2, it was first devised by Stokes Manville and it was popularized by Frankel in 1970’s. The scoring is divided into 5 groups as follows:

Now the ASIA E segment is interesting because in this a person can have an SCI without having any neurological deficits, well at least not detectable. This type of classification has actually improved the reliability and classification of the injury. As the previous classification could only reflect the severity of the injury only. An incomplete injury can be easily further divided into ASIA A, B, C or D also.

So, if I talk about my injury it can be said as T10 ASIA A -Complete.

(To be continued)