A Russian Cure?

Medicine

Help for a paralyzed Yank

It was the second quarter of a football game between Texas Christian University and the University of Alabama. Already behind 14-0, the underdog Texans gave the ball to their junior tailback, Kent Waldrep, 20. Sweeping around the right end, he quickly ran into the Crimson Tide's crushing defense. As two players tried to push him out of bounds on the Alabama 40-yd. line, a third crashed into his legs from behind. Waldrep was hit so hard he flipped over and landed headfirst. Texas went on to lose, 41-3. But for Waldrep that game in 1974 was an even more devastating defeat. He was paralyzed from the neck down.

In the fall, Waldrep crushed his fifth vertebra and bruised the spinal cord. At Birmingham's University Hospital, doctors were able to rebuild the damaged vertebra with a segment from his hip bone, and after intensive physical therapy Waldrep regained some use of his hands, arms and upper body. But he remained immobile from the waist down.

Refusing to accept a life sentence to the wheelchair, Waldrep began investigating an experimental and disputed Soviet treatment being used at Leningrad's Polenov Neurosurgery Research Institute. Helped by the intervention of Texas Congressman Jim Wright, the House majority leader, and contributions of nearly $15,000 from a T.C.U. fund raiser and his home-town folks in Grand Prairie, Texas, Waldrep arrived in Leningrad last October. He was the second American sports figure among the nation's estimated 200,000 spine-injured patients to make that pilgrimage this year. (The other was Race-Car Driver Bob Hurt, who suffered spinal injuries in a crash at Indianapolis in 1968.) Last week, after six weeks of treatment, an ebullient Waldrep returned home to Texas with an increased sense of feeling in his legs and feet. More important, aided by braces, boots and a walker, he is able to stand and, he said, even "walk."

Waldrep ascribed his improvement entirely to the Soviet doctors and therapists, whom he found much more compassionate than American physicians. Said he: "You couldn't get a tear out of a doctor here even if you stuck an onion in his face." As Waldrep described it, his Leningrad regimen involved strenuous physiotherapy (weight lifting, massages, etc.), five-day-a-week sessions in a high-pressure oxygen chamber and, most controversial, daily muscle injections of a tissue-softening enzyme called hyaluronidase. The Soviet rationale for its use: it can prevent and break down scar tissue around damaged spines, thereby presumably encouraging regrowth of healthy nerve fibers and restoring at least some of the cord's ability to transmit nerve signals.

Its use is based on the work of Soviet Physiologist Levon A. Matinyan, who claims to have regenerated severed spinal cords in rats. If he has, he is the first to have done it, and many American spinal experts are openly skeptical of Matinyan's report. Still, the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke was sufficiently intrigued to invite Matinyan and the Polenov's director, Veniamin U. Ugryumov, to the U.S. in 1976. American researchers are trying to duplicate the rat experiment, but Dr. Murray Goldstein, NlNCDS's deputy director, says that preliminary results are disappointing. In Leningrad, Ugryumov acknowledged that the treatment is "complex" and involves a number of factors besides the enzyme, including psychological ones. In Waldrep's case, he added, "all that combined to produce the result: the immobile patient has regained ability to move by use of his back muscles."

Goldstein, for his part, thinks that much of the improvement results not from any basic change in the spinal cord's condition, but from the Soviets' strenuous physiotherapy. Says he: "Braces and boots support the body's weight and keep it upright while the walker is pushed ahead. Then the arms support the body as the legs swing forward. It's not walking. And if the strength in the arms and upper body is not kept up through continued intense rehabilitation, then it's back to the wheelchair." Sadly, he adds, for most paraplegics who try such methods, that is exactly what happens.

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