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Research shows big strides start with small steps


Jeff Adams looked up from his wheelchair at the Bloorview Kids Rehab centre yesterday and saw what might have been.

Coming toward him was Nicholas Schoenhoff, a 15-year-old Oakville, Ont., Grade 10 student who had suffered a broken neck and partially torn spinal cord in a snowboarding accident two years ago.

Once, the injury would have sentenced Nicholas to spend the rest of his life paralyzed from the neck down, at best living in a wheelchair. Instead, the young man was walking toward Adams. They were small steps, and he was using canes, “but he’s walking, and that’s really something incredible,” said Adams, a star of Paralympic wheelchair racing.

Both were on hand to mark the 20th anniversary of the round-the-world journey of Rick Hansen to raise awareness and funds for spinal-cord research. The Rick Hansen Foundation’s Wheels in Motion fundraiser event Sunday at Toronto’s Docks will add to the $178-million collected since 1988 that has supported spinal-cord injury research and the creation of a databank for research and technology.

Almost a quarter century separates the incidents that resulted in Adams and Schoenhoff suffering spinal damage. One of the major tools that benefited Schoenhoff was diagnosis with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). It wasn’t available for Adams, who was a child undergoing treatment for a tumour on his Lumbar spine when a wheelchair became his method of mobility.

“Comparatively, they had to guess a lot in the early 1970s,” Adams said. “They excised the tumour that was wrapping itself around my spine, and then I got chemotherapy and radiation. The spinal cord was getting burned from the radiation. It blistered and burst.

“An MRI would have shown immediately what was happening. Strangely enough, I didn’t have my first MRI until 2004, when I had a concussion from a crash at the Athens Games. It provided news for me, it answered a question in my mind. I’d lived a significant amount of my life not knowing fully why I couldn’t walk. It’s allowed me to manage my Disability better.”

There’s no telling if the availability of an MRI would have saved the use of Adams’s legs, he said, and he won’t spend time wondering how life could be different if he’d been born later, when MRI use is more common.

“You can’t change reality and you can’t change the past. What you can do is make changes today, and I’m benefiting from advances in technology, even now.”

Dr. Michael Fehlings, director of the spinal program at Toronto Western Hospital and chair of the Krembil Neuroscience Centre, said 90 per cent of what is known about spinal-cord injury has been learned in the past 20 years. “And in the next 10 to 15 years we want to translate the fundamental research discoveries into treatments at the patient’s bedside,” he said.

Advances in diagnostic imaging have made it possible to identify the areas of injury and see that the vast majority of injured spinal cords are compressed, not severed. “It’s allowed surgeons to take pressure off that point and insert supports in the spinal column.”

Continued research is crucial, however, because spinal-cord injuries are rising in number. “Not from trauma [accidents] but we’re seeing it in aging baby boomers, with arthritis of the spine. It’s a myth to say that spinal-cord injury is uncommon.”

Schoenhoff’s mother Diane and father Gerald said they were happily stowing the relics of disability in the garage as Nicholas’s movement improved. “We have a ramp, and a walker and next the canes will get hung up,” said Gerald Schoenhoff.

Nicholas comes into Toronto three times a week for physiotherapy and training, “mainly challenging my body to do things,” he said. “Last week, I was on rollerblades, testing my balance with one physio on each side of me.”

The accident will forever loom as a life-altering experience, Diane Schoenhoff said, but not just for the near-tragedy of paralysis. “Nicholas has a new focus academically. His big interest is in neuroscience and how his body works again.”

Nicholas said when he suffered his snowboarding fall he didn’t know what would happen with the rest of his life, but doom wasn’t on his agenda.

“For me, I never really sunk in. It still hasn’t, and that’s the way I like it,” he said.

JAMES CHRISTIE
Globe and Mail Update

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