For many people, paralysis is a permanent state that they have to get used to. Some have been witnesses to miracles and have been able to regain movement, but that only happens to the lucky few. For most, it’s simply a new reality they have to accept.
The good news is that scientists have been looking for methods that may give paralyzed patients new hope. That’s because a team of researchers have witnessed a miracle when they zapped electricity on the spinal cord of primates. These monkeys had been able to regain the use of their arm. They have also been able to use their hands after.
Instead of designing a new and sophisticated equipment, the team wanted to look into electrical stimulation. This was applied to the surviving nerves in severely damaged backbones. After several sessions, this method was able to improve the motor control of the monkeys they tested on.
In the series of experiments made, macaques that suffered from partial arm paralysis learned movements such as reaching, grasping, and pulling a lever just so they can get their favorite treat. Even more impressive was the fact that the scientists saw continued improvement as the days progressed. These primates were able to adapt to this innovative technique.
What they did was fitted the primates with brain implants that were able to detect electrical activity from regions that are in charge of voluntary movement. A small array of electrodes were then placed over these nerve roots that stood from the spinal cord toward the muscles that connected to the arm and hand.
“To perform even the simplest arm movement, our nervous system has to coordinate hundreds of muscles,” said senior author Dr. Marco Capogrosso, of Pittsburgh University. “Replacing this intricate neural control with direct electrical muscle activation would be very difficult outside a laboratory.”
“Instead of stimulating muscles, we simplified the technology by designing a system that uses surviving neurons to restore the connection between the brain and the arm via specific stimulation pulses to the spinal cord, potentially enabling a person with paralysis to perform tasks of daily living.”
“Our protocol consists of simple stimulation patterns that are initiated by detection of the animal’s intention to move,” said co-first author Sara Conti, Ph.D.. she is from Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. “We don’t need to know where the animal wants to move; we only need to know that they want to move, and extracting that information is relatively simple. Our technology could be implemented in clinics in many different ways, potentially without requiring brain implants.”
“Taking a step back and tackling a very complex clinical problem from a different and simpler perspective compared to anything that was done before opens more clinical possibilities for people with arm and hand paralysis,” according to co-first author Beatrice Barra, Ph.D.. she, on the other hand, is a former doctoral student at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and visiting scholar at Pitt, currently at New York University. “By building a technology around the nervous system that mimics what it is naturally designed to do, we get better results.”
Right now, for those with spinal cord injury or for those who have suffered a stroke and lost movement, there are no therapies or medical technologies involved that help them with dexterity, skills that help primates and humans stand out from all the other mammals.
The method of stimulation they had used was verified. They had made sure to do their work thoroughly and extensively by using a mix of computational algorithms and medical imaging. While the method is not able to restore the arm function to the fullest, the stimulation helped improve precision, force, and range of movement significantly. The zapping enabled each animal affected by paralysis to move its arm more efficiently afterwards.
Even more so, they continued to show improvements as they adapted. They also learned how to use stimulation to gain motion. “By building a technology around the nervous system that mimics what it is naturally designed to do, we get better results,” co-author Dr. Beatrice Barra said.
The process of electrical spinal cord stimulation was described in detail in the journal Nature Neuroscience. This will also be tested on paralyzed stroke patients in the US in the latter part of the year. Right now. the University’s Rehabilitation and Neural Engineering Labs is recruiting patients for for the study.
Recommended For You
