PEPTALK | Give the nerve something to do!

The language of this event is Dutch

In our body lies about 60 km of wiring: the peripheral nerves. Nerves have a unique quality! After an injury, they can recover remarkably well: they grow at about one millimeter per day through the nerve sheath, eventually reconnecting with their target organ.

But what if there is no target organ anymore? For example, after an amputation? Then this quality becomes a problem: the nerve bundles grow without direction and form a tangle. This nerve tangle causes severe nerve pain in more than half of patients.

Already more than 125,000 patients in the Netherlands. Justus Groen, neurosurgeon at the Nerve Center, explains how we might be able to prevent this.