Revolutionary technique is helping with spinal cord injuries
A new technique called electrical stimulation is promising to get people with paralysis from spinal cord injuries back to their feet in what could revolutionise study in partial or complete spine injuries. Three participants, one of who had a complete spinal injury, have regained some control over their leg muscles and can walk with assistance.
In a breakthrough study, two other groups used electrical stimulation in several weeks of physical therapy and found participants with the ability to control most of the functions that they had lost control of, including walking. Claudia Angeli, a spinal cord researcher in the University of Louisville, Kentucky reported two of the four people under study with electrical stimulation were able to walk with assistive devices after a physical training of 15 and 85 weeks respectively.
One of the participants, Rob Summers, was hit by a car in a car accident and lost the ability to control his body from the chest down. His injury was classified as complete, which meant that all the motor communications between the brain and lower extremities were fully severed. After weeks of therapy, he could finally wiggle his toe. Doctors first thought that it was an involuntary action coming from the electrical stimulation device that was implanted in his spinal cord. However, they later realised his toe movements were voluntary as he would determine the direction in which the toe moved.
The initial experiment of installing an electrode device in the spinal cord was not meant to help him walk. Instead, the researchers wanted to prove that the spinal cord has an intricate motor circuitry that was sufficient to help the patient stand and walk once a stimulator replaced signals that once came from the brain. Therefore, the voluntary toe movements astonished the researchers.
Medical experts believe that when the spinal cord is injured, the connections between the extremities and the brain are severed. Much of the research, including that of the stem cells research, has been to find ways to repair the connections. However, from the experiments discussed above, researchers believe that some motor connections remain even when the injury has been declared as complete. However, the neural signals through the connections are too weak to elicit the contraction of muscles in the legs. Electrical stimulation helps amplify the signals that are sent across the point of injury and in some cases, re-establishes the links.
Added Benefits
While walking is the ultimate wonder that comes with electrical stimulation, the treatment has been seen to offer more benefits to the patients. They can flex their legs, lower chronic pain, improve blood pressure and enhance the sexual function. Others have had better bowel and bladder control. This has reinforced hopes that people with spinal cord injuries can live a better quality of life. Interestingly, most of the patients experienced these benefits long after the simulator was turned off.
Steps from Trial Results
Thousands of spinal cord injury patients have lined up for experimental trials in electrical stimulation. There are even hospitals offering the procedure at costly rates. However, there are still several steps that have to be made before the therapy can be declared safe and successful. First, researchers are yet to know how electrical stimulation works. It may take time to learn this. It is after this that they can draw a conclusion on the effectiveness of the treatment and who can be treated with the procedure. Actually, the biggest hurdle is to find a way to screen patients with the ability to improve using epidural stimulation.
Just like in the case of stem cell research, replicating the wonder results in a lab setting has proved difficult in many cases. Nevertheless, there is hope that the research is headed in the right direction. Other high-tech approaches have already been developed to reverse injury-induced paralysis. There is a good development in the design of brain-machine interfaces and powered exoskeletons are already being sold. However, these interventions are quite expensive and do not deal with the main issue of severed motor connections.
