Learning Objectives

Speaker: Jacqueline C. Bresnahan, Ph.D.

Insitution: University of California at San Francisco

Session 1.75: Rebuilding and Repairing the Injured Nervous System

Talk title: Assessing Neural Repair and Recovery After Spinal Cord Injury

The goal of this presentation will be to assess the importance of using a broad spectrum of clinically relevant outcome measures in experimental studies of neural repair and recovery after spinal cord injury (SCI). We will describe a number of measures of forelimb, autonomic, and locomotor function that can be used to describe the residual status of animals after experimental spinal cord injury. We will discuss ways to evaluate the usefulness of those outcomes in detecting changes in the residual capacity.

Therefore the learning objectives are

1) To consider a wide range of outcome measures for the assessment of neural repair and recovery after SCI; 2) To assess the applicability of specific measures to the experimental problem; 3) To consider different ways to evaluate experimental outcomes after SCI; and 4) to understand how preclinical testing methods are important for translation to clinical application.