Strategies for protection and repair of damage in the CNS

The absence of consistent spontaneous repair following CNS injury or disease has heightened the need to identify experimental or therapeutic interventions that can promote recovery. The main strategies under current investigation are summarised in Table 2.1 , and involve blocking various aspects of the neurodegenerative process, promoting spontaneous mechanisms of plasticity, and developing new strategies for explicit repair. The different levels of intervention relate to the temporal stages outlined in Table 1.2 and provide a summary of many of the strategies considered in this volume.