| Description |
Traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) affects thousands of individuals every year globally with an even higher incidence of occurrence in the United States. Despite being the subject of active research, there are currently no therapies or treatments to promote regeneration of the long descending motor tracts necessary for human locomotion. In this review the corticospinal, rubrospinal, and vestibulospinal tracts are described with respect to form and function across common animal species used for SCI research. This is further supplemented by neuroanatomical motor tract comparison across species. Last, a brief overview of the SCI pathophysiology and how it pertains to the clinical status of novel therapies to promote human locomotion are discussed. To conduct this review, academic databases (PUBMED, Academic Search Ultimate, EBSCO Host, EBSCO eBooks, Google Scholar) as well as clinical and anatomical textbooks were used to obtain relevant information. Upon review, it was determined that there exists a difference between (a) the origin of the motor tracts, (b) the pathway of each tract, and (c) the termination of each tract across different species. A large gap in anatomical knowledge of the swine motor tracts was also noted. Both (d) the neuroanatomical differences, and (e) complexity of cellular damage mechanisms are among reasons commonly cited as reasons for the lack effective translation of treatments from animal models to human subjects. Large animals, especially non-human primates and swine, are being further explored as intermediate models between rodents and humans and this shift is supported by a large part of the SCI community. |
