Spinal cord injury is a disabling neurological disease. Despite recent clinical improvements in the methods of diagnosis, survival, and well-being of patients with injuries, there are still serious problems in the treatment of neurological and functional disorders of these patients. This slow progression is mainly because of the complexity of the pathophysiology of spinal cord injury and the extensive and numerous physiological and biochemical changes that happen in the injured spinal cord. For this reason, in the last few decades, significant efforts have been made by researchers to identify the pathophysiology of spinal cord injury and to discover the molecular and cellular mechanisms of tissue destruction and repair in the damaged spinal cord. In this regard, several animal models have been applied to create secondary and primary spinal cord injuries and to study their progress. In this article, we will first review the recent advances in understanding spinal cord injury physiopathology. Then, the existing animal models that have been used to identify the spinal cord injury mechanisms and create treatment strategies for this disease will be presented. Despite extensive studies and presentation of various models, there are still some major problems in understanding spinal cord injury, which are: (1) lack of coordination and sufficient anatomical and physiopathological similarity between experimental spinal cord injury and clinical spinal cord injury, (2) inconsistency of pathobiology spinal cord injury between different species and races, (3) difficulty in interpreting the results measured in animals when choosing the appropriate animal model to solve specific research problems.
