Spinal traumas: some postoperative complications in experimental animals.

Animals with severe spinal traumas show paraplegic syndrome and various somatic and autonomic dysfunctions. Of the various dysfunctions those related to hypothermia, bladder problems, and autophagia are of serious nature. The condition of animals with these complications deteriorates rapidly, and the animals are sacrificed for histological and pathological analyses. The findings show that the postoperative complications are related to the degree of severity of the trauma, and that 50-80% animals are lost due to these complications. Most of these animals are lost during the first two weeks after surgery, and the remaining at later stages. Transplantation of neural tissue at the site of lesion does not ameliorate these postoperative complications and improve the survival rate of the animals.