**Thomas Heinbockel, Ph.D.**

**1**

Section 1

Cellular and Clinical

Aspects of Neural

Connectivity

Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Anatomy, Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, DC, USA

**Yongxia Zhou, Ph.D.** University of Southern California and Columbia University, Los Angeles, California, USA Section 1

Cellular and Clinical Aspects of Neural Connectivity

**3**

**Chapter 1**

Injury

**Abstract**

**1. Introduction**

regenerative medicine [8].

Cytokine Profile as a Marker

of Cell Damage and Immune

Dysfunction after Spinal Cord

*Georgii Telegin, Aleksandr Chernov, Alexey Belogurov,* 

**Keywords:** Spinal cord injury, glial scare, cytokines, cellular response

*Irina Balmasova, Nikolai Konovalov and Aleksandr Gabibov*

The study reviews findings of the recent experiments designed to investigate cytokine profile after a spinal cord injury. The role of key cytokines was assessed in the formation of cellular response to trauma. The specific immunopathogenic interaction of the nervous and immune systems in the immediate and chronic post-traumatic periods is summarized. The practicality of a step-by-step approach to assessing the cytokine profile in spinal cord injury is shown, the need to take into account the combination of pathogenetic and protective components in the implementation regulatory effects of individual cytokines, their integration into regenerative processes in the damaged spinal cord, which allows a rational approach to the organization of the treatment process and the development of new medicines.

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a significant global public health issue and a common cause of permanent disability in patients [1, 2]. According to the WHO world population estimates, every year up to 500,000 people suffer a spinal cord injury [3], including young adults between the ages of 20 and 35 [4]. The annual incidence rate of traumatic SCI (TSCI) in developed countries is approx. 3 per 100,000 population [5], though these data could be inconsistent with the big picture, since 16%-30% of patients with spinal injuries die before being admitted to the hospital [6, 7]. Thus, functional recovery of the spinal cord with structural damages caused by trauma is recognized as one of the most challenging and socially essential topics of modern

Mortality from SCI depends mainly on the severity of spinal cord lesion, and at the pre-hospital phase, it reaches 37% [9]. In-hospital mortality rates are affected by the severity of spinal cord damage and the SCI-related early or late complications, as well as the timeliness of specialized health care provision. Mortality rates range between 8 and 58.3% in different medical settings, depending on their capacity [10–12]. High mortality rates (ranging between 16% and 18%) are reported for children. Frequently they are associated with a trauma of the cervical
