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A man who was paralyzed from the neck down after a surfing accident seven years ago is now able to stand and walk on his own, thanks in part to a potentially groundbreaking stem cell treatment. Chris Barr was the very first patient in a Mayo Clinic study that collected stem cells from his own stomach fat, expanded them in a laboratory to 100 million cells and then injected the cells into Barr's lumbar spine. Over five years after undergoing the therapy, Barr said he is continuing to gain more independence and get faster at walking. "I never dreamed I...

Diligent consumers of American pop culture (God save their souls) may have noticed that A-lister (or at least solid B-lister) Jamie Foxx has been MIA since April. Via Fox News:The details of Jamie Foxx’s “medical complication” remain a mystery over a month after the actor was reportedly hospitalized.Foxx, whose condition was first announced by his daughter Corinne Foxx, broke his silence in May but has yet to directly discuss any details of his health and recovery.Close pal and colleague Nick Cannon recently claimed the “Collateral” star will speak to fans “when he’s ready.”Quoting an anonymous source close to the family,...

People around the globe have suffered serious adverse reactions resulting from COVID vaccines, especially from the Pfizer shot. Now the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tells us another Pfizer vaccine can cause serious complications in recipients. After receiving Pfizer’s Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) shot during a clinical trial, two older individuals contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome. This was enough for the FDA to flag the disease as “an important potential risk” from the RSV shot. Yet Pfizer is still seeking approval for general public use. According to the Mayo Clinic, Guillain-Barré syndrome is a rare disorder in which your body’s immune system...

A single injection of a newly developed drug has been shown to reverse paralysis in mice with severe spinal cord injuries. By mimicking the extra-cellular matrix around the spine, the liquified drug promotes the regeneration of severed nerves and the repair of other vital tissues, allowing the rodents to regain the ability to walk within four weeks. Describing this breakthrough in a new study in the journal Science, researchers explain how they injected synthetic nanofibers into the damaged tissue of mice 24 hours after making a cut in their spinal cords. Consisting of an array of peptides, these nanofibers quickly...

Brandy Parker-McFadden is still a proponent of the Covid-19 vaccines. We, on the other hand, are not. A Nashville woman felt extreme pain in her neck before waking up paralyzed from the neck down less than 24-hours after taking the second dose of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine. Brandy Parker-McFadden, a mother of three, has been hospitalized for nearly two weeks. Her story has gone nearly completely unreported by mainstream media with local media only picking up the story after Parker-McFadden started getting sensation back in her extremities. That local news outlet, WKRN News 2 in Nashville, has been bracketing the...

BETHEL PARK, Pa. — There have been some negative side effects reported worldwide from the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines, but a Bethel Park woman told Channel 11 she has been affected by something that hadn’t been seen at all yet: paralysis. The 33-year-old woman, who asked to remain anonymous, said she felt fine in the hours after getting the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine last week. However, she said 12 hours later, she woke up in the middle of the night with no feeling in her arms or legs. “It was the scariest thing in...

Adam Gorlitsky hit the wall hard during his second marathon attempt around the mile 20-mark this past Saturday at the Charleston Marathon in South Carolina. The only other time he had ever run this far was during his first marathon attempt last March at the Los Angeles Marathon. While battling against pain in his wrists and legs and pushing the limits on the motors on his ReWalk Robotic Exoskeleton, Gorlitsky fought on, not only hoping to capture his first marathon finish, but also better the world record for fastest marathon in a robotic walking machine. He did just that after...

A virus (AFM - acute flaccid myelitis) appears to be the cause behind a rash of polio-like illnesses that struck Minnesota last fall, causing paralyzing symptoms in several children, including one girl who lost all motor function and remains hospitalized. Researchers from Minnesota and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday that they found Enterovirus-D68 in the spinal fluid of one of six children who suffered acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM. The first public reports of AFM in 2018 showed up in Minnesota, which ended the year with 10 of the nation’s 228 confirmed cases. EV-D68 has...

Two days after her 21st birthday on May 25, 2018, Anastasia Soule was lying in an emergency room in New Orleans, Louisiana. She didn’t see it coming. And she definitely wasn’t prepared for what came next. Before things went south, the weekend was set to be the ultimate mother-daughter getaway. Soule, a senior studying economics and public policy at the University of North Carolina, had planned a vacation to New Orleans with her mom, opting for a few relaxed days exploring the Southern city instead of a rowdy trip with friends. But from the moment their plane landed on Thursday,...

Paralysed people could walk again instantly after scientists developed a brain implant which turns thought into electrical signals in the spine so that lost feeling can be restored after injury. Currently people who break their backs or suffer a spinal trauma are unable to stand or move even though their legs still work, because the signal which connects their brains to their muscles is disconnected. But an international team of scientists have shown it is possible to bypass the injury and reconnect the brain signals to electrodes at an undamaged part of the spine. Two monkeys who were temporarily paralysed...

Adult zebrafish are capable of regenerating their spinal cords after a complete severing injury. This close-up of the cells involved reveals supporting glial cells (shown in red) are first to cross the gap between the severed ends. Neuronal cells (green) soon follow. Duke Regeneration Next researchers discovered that a protein in the glia called connective tissue growth factor, or CTGF, is crucial for this process. Credit: Mayssa Mokalled and Kenneth Poss, Duke University ============================================================================================================================ A freshwater zebrafish costs less than two bucks at the pet store, but it can do something priceless: Its spinal cord can heal completely after being...

SEATTLE - A mysterious illness that hospitalized several local children has now turned deadly. A 6-year-old boy who has been treated for the disease for more than two weeks passed away Sunday night.

Dennis Byrd, a former New York Jets defensive end whose career was cut short in 1992 because of a broken neck, was killed in a head-on vehicle collision Saturday near his home in Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol confirmed to ESPN. Byrd, 50, was pronounced dead at the scene due to massive injuries.

Before dinner on July 29, 3-year-old Carter Roberts of Chesterfield, Va., seemed perfectly healthy. That evening, he vomited. When he woke up the next morning with a slight fever of 99 degrees, his mother, Robin Roberts, figured that he was coming down with a cold. The next morning, she found him collapsed on his bedroom floor. “Mommy,” she recalls him saying. “Help me, help me.” Carter could barely stand when she picked him up, and his neck was arched backward. “What was most alarming,” she said, “is he had no control over his right arm whatsoever.” In the hospital, Carter...

It is often said that, given an infinite amount of time, monkeys hitting random keys on a typewriter will eventually type the works of Shakespeare. While it may seem far fetched, an unusual experiment has achieved the fabled task. To illustrate how paralysed people can type using a device called a ‘brain-computer interface’, scientists used monkeys to show how it can be done. Two rhesus macaque monkeys (stock picture) typed a passage from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as well as portions of the New York Times, at 12 words per minute.

In seven countries that recently experienced Zika outbreaks, there were also sharp increases in the numbers of people suffering from a form of temporary paralysis, researchers reported Wednesday. The analysis, published online in The New England Journal of Medicine, adds to substantial evidence that Zika infections — even asymptomatic ones — may bring on a paralysis called Guillain-Barré syndrome. The syndrome can be caused by a number of other factors, including infection with other viruses. Researchers studying the Zika epidemic in French Polynesia had estimated that roughly 1 in 4,000 people infected with the virus could develop the syndrome. The...

A novel virus from Peru and the Republic of Congo called enterovirus C105 is now suspected in last year's wave of mysterious cases of sudden childhood paralysis. Initially, enterovirus D68, the respiratory virus that took the lives of 12 children in the US last year, was the main suspect in these polio-like illnesses, involving at least 118 children, including a cluster of cases in Denver, CO and another in Syracuse, NY. But soon researchers admitted they were stumped. In the fall of 2014, the CDC asked clinicians to report all such pediatric paralysis cases. Today, disease detectives at the University...

Mysterious cases of paralysis in U.S. children over the last year have researchers searching for the cause of the illness. Now, a new study suggests that a new strain of a poliolike virus may be responsible for some of the cases. So far, more than 100 children in 34 states have suddenly developed muscle weakness or paralysis in their arms or legs, a condition known as acute flaccid myelitis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Previously, researchers linked a virus called enterovirus D68 (EV-D68), which can cause respiratory illness similar to the common cold, with some of...

The man volunteering to be the guinea pig for pioneering head transplant surgery is flying to America this week to meet for the first time the doctor intending to give him a new body. Russian Valery Spiridonov will appear at a major medical conference in Annapolis with Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero, who hopes to convince the medical establishment that his techniques are on the brink of viability. But he prepared to fly to New York today, one of Moscow's top surgeons branded the £9.8million ($15million) head transplant plan 'reckless', claiming the medic - who has been labelled Dr Frankenstein by...