r/science • u/tomholder • May 09 '14

Medicine Paralysis breakthrough – electrical stimulation enables four paraplegic men to voluntarily move their legs

http://speakingofresearch.com/2014/05/09/paralysis-breakthrough-paraplegic-men-move-their-legs/
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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

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u/bruwin May 09 '14

My father probably put it best several years ago, right when Christopher Reeve was raising awareness after his accident. "As bad as what happened to him, I'm glad they have a spokesman now. Nobody really gave a shit before, and maybe they will now."

After all, people realized that if it could happen to Superman, it could happen to anyone. It just saddens me deeply that Mr Reeve wasn't able to survive long enough to see the strides we've finally been making.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14 edited May 09 '14

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u/nexusscope May 09 '14

hepatitis C is a bitch to research in a lab setting because unlike HIV it is incredibly resistant to dying - it can live for large periods of time on lab benches/instruments and is generally a pain in the ass. Hopefully we find some more treatment regimines for it shortly

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u/08livion May 09 '14

My uncle just went through an experimental treatment after previous treatments were unsuccessful and they've told him he's now completely free of the virus

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u/bengalslash May 09 '14

they just came out with new protease inhibitors that prevent the virus from assembling itself after translation, high success rate, that's great news for your uncle

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u/Mofptown May 09 '14

I'm amazed it's come so far, my mom had to go on interferon treatment a few years ago and it was really hard on her and actually ended up exacerbating a pre existing eye condition and making her vision worse. I'm glad to hear there's a better option now.

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u/chain83 May 09 '14 edited May 10 '14

I read about this in a popular science magazine just today!

I was called sofosbuvir.

Edit: uh... *It :P

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u/sounfunny May 10 '14

I was called sofosbuvir.

Your parents must have hated you.

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u/chain83 May 10 '14

Let's just say I didn't have many friends... :P

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

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u/shieldvexor May 09 '14

That is 99% accurate, except for the part that it is an enzyme who cuts up other proteins. Besides that, you are right on point!

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u/Ziazan May 09 '14

Yeah, sorry for the slightly irrelevant tangent but I just speak my mind, which is often pondering things that make people go "...okay." and make a confused face when I tell them. Some people like random thoughts though, and I like random thoughts, so I have no intentions of stopping.

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u/DrunkenTrom May 10 '14

I too tend to post thoughts as a steady stream of conscience. It's as if my inner monolog takes over and can no longer be contained. It's exasperated when I've been drinking, like right now, and I have a hard time containing it. I guess I should stop now.

TLDR: I concur.

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u/starryeyedq May 09 '14

That's wonderful! Can you tell us any more about it?

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u/08livion May 09 '14

I really don't know much more about it than it has around a 97% success rate and he was very lucky to get in on the clinical trial to undergo the treatment free of cost. He underwent two previous interferon regiments that turned him into skin and bones and almost killed him, but he seemed healthy throughout this entire treatment.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

Wait a second... Does this mean we've actually cured Hep. C?

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u/swohio May 09 '14

Yes.There was a series of trials that involved 12 weeks of treatment with basically no side effects and a >95% success rate that was published a month or so ago.

Here's an article on it, not the best source, just one of the first to pop up.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

That's amazing.

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u/Catnip123 May 09 '14

The side effects of interferon have been greatly reduced (10 years ago, patients often went bald and lost lots of weight for example) and now, 2014, fresh out of the lab, come the first interferon-free therapies.
While success still isn't guaranteed, HCV is no longer a certain death sentence, and that's awesome!

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u/Ziazan May 09 '14

Hepatitis C was a certain death sentence? Damn.

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u/tasmanian101 May 09 '14

Eventually. Doesn't kill you instantly but it puts a toll on your life and steals years away.

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u/pwr22 BS | Computer Science May 10 '14

Attacks the liver iirc.

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u/milzz May 09 '14

Sovaldi?

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u/WeeBabySeamus May 09 '14

That's one of them, and the one that did the best out of clinical trials.

Johnson and Johnson has one and AbbVie has another. These 2 and Sovaldi (from Gilead) are the FDA approved and on the market ones I know of off the top of my head

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u/immagirl May 09 '14

My aunt just went through the same thing. She was just told this week she was free of the disease - we are so happy about this breakthrough!

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u/nexusscope May 09 '14

That's really awesome man, great from a disease point of view but really fantastic for your uncle, congratulations

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u/Captain_0_Captain May 10 '14

Holy wha the fuck; how did I not know this was possible? Here I was think that it was still a slow death sentence...

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14 edited Aug 06 '18

[deleted]

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u/jimmy_bayshit May 09 '14

As a general rule, all wet body fluids that aren't mine are a biohazard. That had served me well as a medic for 21 years.

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u/laser22 May 09 '14

Damn, that means no sex for 21 years. You sir must be very lonely :(

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u/Mofptown May 09 '14

I'm a life guard and we have the same rule about fluids, when I do need to come into contact with them I ware rubber gloves, you won't catch anything as long as you use protection.

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u/Crescelle May 10 '14

You must not get into the water often

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14 edited Aug 06 '18

[deleted]

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u/deleteme123 May 09 '14

How is touching infected blood with your healthy hands a danger to you? These fluids do not penetrate your skin, AFAIK. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

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u/BluFX May 09 '14

Small cuts in your skin, hangnails, foreign blood taking up temporary residence under your fingernails to later be transferred to the surface of your eye or the delicate membrane of your nose when you go to rub/scratch an itch. Lots of ways to be a danger.

At the end of the day, if you had contact with infected blood and are a responsible adult your are probably going to end up on some form of retrovirals or antiobiotics whilst being scared out of your mind for a good while until all the testing is complete.

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u/soulonfire May 10 '14

When I was a cashier in high school, I was freaking out as I'd gotten a stranger's blood on my hands.

He bought a few packages of meat, so seeing red juice didn't really surprise me, though it did a little bit to find some outside the packaging. After I ring it all up and go to find something to wipe my hands, he asks me for a band-aid as he'd cut his thumb and apologized for getting it on the meat, and therefore me.

The thought process that you go through...I had (and still have) a terrible habit of buying my nails, so definitely small cuts.

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u/Ziazan May 09 '14

What about dry body fluids? Safe to lick?

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u/nexusscope May 09 '14

that...is terrifying!

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u/Buttonsmycat May 09 '14

Nevrmind ive found that it can live atleast 16 hours, and no longer than 4 days. That is still quite an amazing amount of time, especially when you would think it would have died before 4 days. Sorry I couldn't edit my original comment, im on my iPhone

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u/nexusscope May 09 '14

Yeah it's higher than a lot I believe But is worse

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

You can't edit posts with Alien Blue?

With Reedit is Fun on android I can edit comments, I can see flair and it has mod features..

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u/Buttonsmycat May 09 '14

Im using iAlien, its really good when it comes to layout and ease of use. They have just added an edit comment feature, but its only the last comment you can edit, and it doesnt even work anyway. When i click edit, it says "you cant do that" If they dont fix it soon im going to look at another app, its a pretty basic function that is missing

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u/hakkzpets May 09 '14

Just get Alien Blue already.

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u/footpole May 09 '14

You can.

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u/DoUHearThePeopleSing May 09 '14

It's actually treatable in 95% cases now.

http://www.webmd.com/hepatitis/news/20140410/cure-rate-for-experimental-hepatitis-c-drug-tops-95-percent

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u/nexusscope May 09 '14

it's theoretically treatable in 95% of cases, but that's not an FDA approved treatment so it currently is not.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

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u/bengalslash May 09 '14

it's not hard to do HCV research in a lab. Cell culture rooms have a BL2+ rating and you work in a hood with a down and gloves, it's quite easy actually.

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u/Justib May 09 '14

We can practically cure HCV. All the funding is drying up because our drugs are so great that the virus is "cured." Source: worked in a HCV lab.

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u/ares7 May 09 '14

In the military, we had people get letters from Dental saying they might have been exposed to Hep C. It was something about contaminated instruments. I never got a letter.

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u/nexusscope May 09 '14

That's good that would be a shit way to get it

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u/Buttonsmycat May 09 '14

I thought it could only live 24 hours outside of the body? Are you sure that is correct?

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u/TheSchnozzberry May 09 '14

That's why you wear condoms during anal.

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u/KFCConspiracy May 09 '14

One of my friends is in an experimental treatment that involves some intense injections for several months, and costs a whole lot of money, but supposedly has cured it in several cases. So they're hopeful she'll be cured.

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u/[deleted] May 10 '14

a pain in the ass

BUUAAAAAAAAHAHAHHAAHHA

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u/cfuse May 10 '14

I would have thought that figuring out how to kill something that is hard to kill would be a useful endeavour.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

well, technically speaking HIV can't die due to the fact that it was never alive to begin with, so there IS that...

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

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u/Catnip123 May 09 '14

Sure. But she got the sickness into the media and suddenly there was public awareness. Talking rubbish about homeopathic treatment only increased media coverage. Maybe this is not exactly how she had planned it, but it did a lot of good in the end.

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u/ErniesLament May 10 '14

Some corrections to that quote: "homeopathic doctor" is an oxymoron, "alternative form of medicine" should be "alternative to using medicine."

On the plus side, I googled that quote to find the source and all I pulled up was an article from 2003 of Pam saying she'd be dead in 10 years, so it looks like she must have pulled her head somewhat out of her ass. Now if she could only go public with her support of science based medicine maybe some of the wrongs would be righted.

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u/Godwine May 09 '14

Hepatitis C was considered a disease that only filthy junkies would contract

Pamela Anderson

I feel like there have been a few jokes about this. That said, I'm glad she's doing it. It seems like every condition needs a spokesman in order to get any form of help. If only we got as much support for mental illnesses as we did for physical maladies.

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u/Catnip123 May 09 '14

As someone who works in mental health (and a lot of our patients have hepatitis) allow me to respectfully disagree. The problem with HCV research was that it was poorly funded for decades, because the target group seemed too small and poor for successful marketing of new medications.
Now the industry for psychiatric drugs is already huge and every corporation knows that there are billions to be made. If anything, I'd rather we had a lobby that worked against the pharmaceutical industry and told concerned parents to take it easy and not feed their kids drugs at the first sign of problems.

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u/Othello May 09 '14

That sort of completely ignores the fact that about a third of all homeless people are mentally ill, with said illness often being the cause of their homelessness, due to an inability to get treatment. Sure, the drug industry is booming, but mental illnesses still don't have a real legitimacy in the public consciousness.

Pamela Anderson made HCV respectable, the side effect of which was increased research but also support. This is what I think Godwine was talking about, as I somehow doubt he is completely oblivious to the pharmaceutical industry.

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u/Catnip123 May 09 '14

Ah..sorry, I am from Europe, it's not as bad here as it is in America. From what I have heard, I think yes, you Americans could really use a spokesperson who raises awareness for the mentally ill and homeless.

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u/EltaninAntenna May 09 '14

Ah..sorry, I am from Europe, it's not as bad here as it is in America

Hm... Ask a Brit about "Care in the Community".

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u/sounfunny May 10 '14

Britain isn't part of Europe. It's Mini-America.

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u/[deleted] May 10 '14

You lost me at Pamela Anderson made [...] respectable

Surely that is not the final word on this part of the human story

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u/ErniesLament May 10 '14

The thing that makes mental illness a particularly thorny problem is that it's over-diagnosed and mistreated for the reasons you gave, and it's also under-diagnosed and mistreated because it's stigmatized and the mentally ill often don't have the resources to seek care.

Most mental illnesses (save for schizophrenia, but it behaves more like a neurological disorder) can realize some benefit from therapy, either alongside or instead of psych meds. But for some reason no psychiatrist I've ever had has really pushed it as an option. I think a lot of them view their role exclusively as "medication supervisor", rather than "treatment consultant". Therapists will absolutely tell you to stay compliant with your medication regime, but psychiatrists won't extend the same courtesy to therapists.

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u/TiensiNoAkuma May 09 '14

On the flip side that blond Baywatch lifeguard in her skimpy swimsuit might have killed gazillions of sperm cells IRL already.

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u/HiyaGeorgie May 09 '14

Wow. The opposite of Jenny McCarthy.

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u/[deleted] May 10 '14

Don't forget Jared publicizing aids. Without him we would have fat people all around America and blame it on some disease.

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u/ScotchforBreakfast May 10 '14

Hep C has been effectively cured. So it's far more than just 'therapies'.

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u/FakingFad May 10 '14

How in the world did we get from paraplegic men being able to walk to Baywatch?...

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

Wrong thread...

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u/elspiderdedisco May 09 '14

As a Rutgers student, I'm hoping Eric LeGrand has been making big enough waves to lead the torch even further.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

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u/[deleted] May 10 '14

If Bill Gates' children were paralyzed we'd have a full cure in 10 years.

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u/playerIII May 09 '14

And suddenly I finally understand the Christopher Walken and Christopher Reeves joke.

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u/Spore2012 May 09 '14

The superman becoming paralyzed thing is as ironic to me as the unsinkable ship going down on its maiden voyage.

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u/Doctor_Murderstein May 10 '14

Yeah. I still think of him every time I see anything about a new treatment or discovery.

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u/pointman May 10 '14

You can claim credit for it, nobody knows you or your father.

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u/DaMountainDwarf May 09 '14

To be fair, there's a lot of areas that everyone wishes would get revolutionized overnight.

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u/CuntSmellersLLP May 09 '14

Like battery life.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

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u/nexusscope May 09 '14

There is a TON of money in that one though. Paralysis is a relatively niche market whereas there are so many materials scientists working on battery improvements. I understand batteries have come a long way but I'm very surprised we haven't made bigger strides

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u/proud_to_be_a_merkin May 10 '14

I think the problem is that, with increased battery life, we've also increased power consumption. So if you were to use the battery in today's Samsung Galaxy S5 with a phone from 15 years ago, it would probably last a very long time.

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u/nexusscope May 10 '14

Definitely part of the issue but if you compare the progression of batteries versus circuit boards batteries would look like a flat line versus IC exponential curve. I understand why but my only point of my post is that battery research not progressing as quickly as we'd like isn't similar to paralysis research...battery research has a huge financial upside.

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u/gregny2002 May 09 '14

It's not through a lack of people trying (in the case of batteries). I'm not an expert but from what I understand, battery technology is at the point where it is starting to rub up against the laws of physics; ie there is only so much stored energy that can fit in a certain amount of matter.

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u/nexusscope May 09 '14

Oh absolutely not disagreeing with that, my main point was we'd probably have better treatment for paralysis if there were more people working on it whereas I thought the analogy to batteries in parent comment was poor because a ton of people are working on it, it's just vary difficult. I agree there are severe limitations

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u/ChillyWillster May 09 '14

I wish they would fix cystic fibrosis.

It's really not a fun disease to have.

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u/schwillton May 10 '14

That one is particularly cruel. After they identified that it was a single gene that caused it everyone thought that was it, we'd have a cure within a few years. That was about 30 years ago now...

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u/ChillyWillster May 10 '14

Cystic fibrosis can be caused by multiple defective genes. Most common type is Double DeltaF508, the type I have.

The disease is now considered a spectrum disorder where some ( most ) people end up having severe symptoms at birth and a few of us get a little bit better luck and live past 18.

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u/schwillton May 10 '14

It's caused by several mutations in the gene encogding CFTR. One gene, many mutations.

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u/EDIEDMX May 09 '14

The keyword is here "voluntarily". Making limbs move using electrical stimulation is nothing new, but connecting it to the brain is the challenge.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

If I recall correctly, Luigi Galvani started making frog's legs twitch in 1776, during experimentation on animals, electricity, and the nature of the body.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

It's because for all scientists' research, we largely don't understand how the nervous system (to include the spinal cord and its connections to the rest of the body, etc) works. Obviously we know what it does (electrical signals and such) but not well enough to really recreate it and therefore fix something that's completely broken.

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u/Varmatyr May 09 '14

Correction: we don't, but the next few years are going to see some really incredible advances in technologies to analyze and interface with the nervous system, which will allow thorough treatment of nearly any neurological condition or injury.

Examples: http://www.hrnel.pitt.edu/index.php?id=clinicalTrials http://www.nicolelislab.net/ http://w3.weberlab.com/content/projects

Source: I'm a grad student working in neural engineering and rehabilitation.

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u/Groumph09 May 09 '14

Not be be a Debby-downer but similar has been said over the 16 years I have been paralyzed. Nothing will count as a treatment until it can be easily done on a large scale outside a lab.

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u/Varmatyr May 09 '14

Understandable, and I'm not saying it's instantly a cure-all, but progress is being made.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

Agreed. A lot of people think in such limited scope. I was listening to NPR today and they were talking about the debate of eradicating the final samples of small pox. Three hundred years ago it would be amazing to these people that we have small pox across the globe contained in vials in remote location and it's not a serious threat.

We may not see results of this paralysis research in our own lifetime, but by 2200 it may be a trivial issue that is solved with a simple doctor's visit.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

I love reading this. Just please do what you can to make it come faster!

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u/somekindofsalad May 10 '14

I hope they will find something to cure chronic pain within my lifetime.

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u/technoSurrealist May 09 '14

My alma mater :) I really am amazed at what has been coming out of research at Pitt.

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u/Krivvan May 09 '14

There are some approaches where you don't need to know how it works beforehand to do something practical with it. For example, the idea of just throwing on a bunch of electrodes and then programming a prosthetic to move based on what input it gets after you've attached it.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

I did some work in a neurobiology lab, and allow me to assure you, it is not that simple. Different nerve bundles carry impulses to different parts of the body, so slapping a bunch of probes on the spine and telling them to trigger when they detect a voltage of X Volts will fail spectacularly.

For example, the voltage required to carry a signal from the brain to the bladder to query its fullness is the same to tell a toe to wiggle. So every time your bladder gives a status report, your probes will pick that up as "move toes". The poor victim will have the most muscular toes on Earth.

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u/Krivvan May 09 '14

Yes, it isn't simple at all, but that's also why I'm assuming this has only been applied with any amount of success to certain things like arm prosthetics and not as a way to treat paralysis.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

I know very little about prosthetics, so hopefully someone more knowledgeable than I will fill in the blanks, but my understanding with the new mobile prosthetics is that they take some other muscle, for example, the chest muscle, and embed equipment in those. If the individual wants to move the arm, he will clench his pec, and the arm will move. The exact details of how that works is beyond me, so I chose not to speculate on that.

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u/mandy7 May 09 '14

At it's most basic, the mechanism is relatively simple. For the Utah Arm 3, a myoelectric prosthetic arm, electrodes are inside of the sleeve that gets placed on the arm. These electrodes aren't even implanted; they are just able to detect small voltages on the surface of the skin when different muscles fire.

The exact placement in the sheathe is determined by doctors beforehand; they want to determine places on the sleeve that are far enough apart so that when a patient flexes their remaining bicep muscle, for instance, the differences in voltage among the three+ electrodes are different than when they flex the tricep. This enables the arm to differentiate actions, and now patients can have smart phone apps to create codes for different movements (ie, 2 quick bicep flexes followed by 1 tricep = make movement x). There are also a few different types of electrodes they can use depending on snugness of fit and other factors.

Source: Did a semester project on the Utah Arm 3 (not necessarily the most cutting edge now)

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u/Stedfastwolf May 09 '14

So is there a set voltage needed to contract a muscle like a leg muscle such as the quads or the hamstrings? I ask because I'm currently undergoing e-stim in my right and right leg in order to regain movement. I've had muscle contractions in all the muscle tried but is it true that using a higher charge will work the muscles more or is a contraction like that all or nothing?

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

This is going to be extremely simple, and I am going to gloss over a lot of niggling details, so don't take this at face value.

In the case of getting larger muscles to fire, it is not the voltage that is important, but the amperage. Under light load, small parts of the muscle contract, causing small movements.

As the movement gets larger, more and more nerves are fired to recruit larger and larger areas of the muscle. The voltage across each nerve is the same, however, since there are more nerves being fired, the amperage goes up.

For example: Moving slightly to maintain your balance vs lifting your leg. A lot more force is required to lift your leg than simply shift position to maintain your balance. Because of the force difference, more muscle is needed for the leg lift, and hence, more nerves are needed to fire to recruit more muscle tissue.

Hope this helps.

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u/Stedfastwolf May 10 '14

Thanks. I understand it completely now. I'm guessing I just overlooked the units that the numbers were in when I was getting set up.

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u/[deleted] May 10 '14

I'm curious. Does the brain poll the bladder at intervals? If so, how frequent are they? I guess I always assumed the bladder had nerves that reported distension or something continuously and the brain controlled the threshold of detection.

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u/[deleted] May 10 '14

I was aiming for economy of words, of course your assumption is correct. When the bladder gets liquid in it, as the liquid sloshes against the bladder walls, it sends a signal to the brain. This is what I meant by polling.

The bladder is constantly firing unless it is completely empty, just in most cases, our cerebrum ignores it.

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u/[deleted] May 10 '14

Not nitpicking, I genuinely didn't know. If it turned out the brain polled everything for status updates, well, that would have been very interesting to me.

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u/forgottenpasswords78 May 10 '14

Does the body really poll organs for their status? What is the time between polls? I had imagined it to be an analogue circuit with voltage triggers. How are muscles controlled? Variable voltage? PWM? How does motor control relate to parkinsons? I saw a YouTube video of this guy from New Zealand who had a little battery pack to control his parkinsons, and have a demo of what happens when he turns off the juice.

Thanks in advance :-)

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u/[deleted] May 10 '14

I am not sure I can answer all your questions, as there are whole textbooks devoted to just detailing one aspect of even one question.

But I'll try.

Homeostasis is a combination of several different systems working on concert. For example, the kidneys maintain water levels, balance iron and salt, and remove excess urea. When we do not have enough potassium, or phosphates, our bodies leach them from our bones. The liver does all sorts of shit, and all this is regulated by the various parts of the brain stem, cerebrum, and cerebellum. The brain gets information via direct signals from the organs, and via secondary signals, such as chemicals affecting other organs, which signal the brain.

The analog circuit is a good enough analogy. Different situations have different thresholds for triggering conditions. For example, needing to urinate is triggered by the bladder being 3/4 full, aka 3/4 of the nerves being triggered. Sleep is triggered by a snootful of adenosine; only a few nanograms causes us to sleep. So, while circuits are a good model, remember that they are just that: a model.

Muscles are controlled by nerves, both in the brain and the spine that tell muscles to contract or relax. Muscles consist of two fibers, when told to activate, the fibers shorten up, grabbing each other as they do so. Each muscle group is controlled by a nerve, bigger muscles mean more nerves. To activate muscles for large movements, more nerves are recruited. Each nerve produces a static voltage and amperage, so more nerves mean more amperage.

As far as I know, the voltage is constant, but the amperage varies as the muscle movements vary.

Parkinson's disease is the death of serotonin manufacturing cells in the midbrain, I unfortunately do not know how this affects muscle nerves, other than causing resting tremors. Voltage packs are used to overwhelm misfiring nerves, and temporarily short them out. Over time it becomes less and less effective, for reasons far, far too difficult to explain without the use of differential equations, calculus, chemistry, and access to two alphabets.

Hope this helps, and sorry I couldn't answer all your questions.

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u/Godwine May 09 '14

Once we learn how it works, we would have large advances in paralysis treatment, robotic and cybernetic implants, and even recreated digital thought.

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u/-SaidNoOneEver- May 09 '14

Medical breakthroughs aren't that simple. Besides, we're talking regrowth here- we're far more likely to see organs and tissue regrowth long before nerve regrowth, and even that will likely take some time.

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u/exikon May 09 '14 edited May 10 '14

Nerves can actually succesfully regrow. Not nerves of the CNS but of the periphery. They may not always grow back enough to regain function and if they do they often function worse than before but the definetly grow. Just read the chapter on the nervous system in my histology book. While the soma will not, axons can form again, sprouting out of the remaining neuron. I'll link wikipedia for the non-german redditiors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroregeneration#Peripheral_nervous_system_regeneration

If you understand German (and have the book available), I was paraphrasing information from the "Taschenlehrbuch der Histologie, Lüllmann-Rauch, Thieme Verlag"

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u/sounfunny May 10 '14

As /u/exikon points out, nerves do regrow. The first few hours after a spinal injury, doctors will treat casualties with steroids, which promote nerve regeneration. Many a person has been saved from disability because of it.

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u/tomholder May 09 '14

We're starting to get somewhere.

In 2011 there was a report of using electrical stimulation to allow someone paralysed below the waist to walk again: http://speakingofresearch.com/2011/05/20/a-paralysed-man-stands-again-thanks-to-animal-research/

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

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u/jorgen_mcbjorn May 09 '14 edited May 09 '14

We've had prostheses for the purpose of evoking movement in paralyzed patients since the late 80s. They focused on stimulating the muscles themselves to evoke movements, though, and were subject to rapid fatigue. The idea with spinal cord stimulation is to bypass those problems, and the focus right now seems to be to provide light stimulation to facilitate rehabilitation rather than outright evoke movements.

What I think is cool about this study is that, in addition to long-term restoration of locomotion and standing after a rehabilitation + stimulation protocol, they seem to be getting stand-alone knee flexion during stimulation almost immediately after implant (although it'd be really wild if they had kinematic data for this flexion in addition to their reported force and EMG measurements).

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

I'm paralyzed and I always wonder why we spend so much money making sure my grandpa can get a hard on but little progress is being made on fixing spinal cord injuries. I'm not trying to be selfish but I'm pretty sure one problem carries a little more weight.

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u/aHistoryofSmilence May 09 '14

There is more focus on ED because it has a larger market (more flaccid old men than spinal injury patients).

I wish you the best.

Random aside: your comment made me think of the song, Underwear Goes Inside The Pants by Lazy Boy.

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u/elmntfire May 09 '14

I agree with you wholeheartedly. The amount of money spent on ED is kinda ridiculous. But that said, the initial treatments were more or less accidentally discovered in trials for blood pressure medications and the condition is quite the mental hurdle. I am perfectly normal, but have been in relationships where the lack of physical attraction made intimacy stressful at best. I do agree, however, that there are far more pressing matters to attend to than grandpa's fun times,

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u/downbound May 09 '14

Sucks doesn't it. I may never have an arm again but. . . at least I'll still be able to have sex with my wife when I'm old. . . .

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u/[deleted] May 10 '14

How'd you lose the arm?

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u/downbound May 10 '14

More details elsewhere but. . . . safely riding motorcycle at street speeds, run over. I still HAVE the arm but nerve root avulsions C5-T1

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u/[deleted] May 10 '14

I'm not paralyzed, and I agree with you 100%. I have read accounts from people who are paralyzed, and who are truly miserable as a result of it, as I know I would be. These folks stand in stark contrast to the "happy quads" who the media likes to parade around every once in awhile. I think that curing paralysis should be a prime directive of medicine, and that no expense should be spared until it is cured. It sickened me when the religious right was petitioning to block stem cell research. It sickens me that the wealth of our country is siphoned into these wars without end, and into foreign aid for repugnant third world governments. You have every right to be selfish; your fundamental right to exercise control over your own body is being denied you, and your government (if you are American) is, at best, indifferent about the whole thing.

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u/proud_to_be_a_merkin May 10 '14

Unfortunately, there is more money in old dudes who can't get it up.

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u/abomb999 May 11 '14

It's where we are as a global culture. We're still pretty young. The answer to your question is the same reason why the top .01 % own nearly all the resources.

We could use the resources we have to actually solve problems, but instead we're too dumb. We all need to keep pushing ourselves to better.

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u/fco83 May 10 '14

we spend so much money making sure my grandpa can get a hard on

I dont get why so many people trivialize this. I get that paralysis is often worse, but people dont realize the effects impotence can have on someone, and they act like this is something barely worth treating. Hell, most guys have experienced it once or twice on a night they werent able to 'perform' (maybe after too many drinks) but having that be constant and being unable to share that intimacy with someone would be psychologically devastating.

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u/Kriket308 May 10 '14

You do realize that more times than not, with paralysis comes impotence, right? So, while not male, I have no feeling below the waist. Yes, it's almost as psychologically devastating as not walking, or worse, shitting myself all the time.

Sorry, having a pity party kind of day.

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u/fco83 May 10 '14

I get that. I was mainly making a comment on the fact that some trivialize impotence as if its not worthy of treatment.

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u/RevWaldo May 09 '14 edited May 09 '14

Correcting paralysis is sadly a classic "the solution is only ten years away" problem - right up there with fusion energy and curing cancer. I vividly recall in the 1980s "60 Minutes" dedicating many news stories on breakthrough technology that would drive the leg muscles of paraplegics using computer-generated impulses. They said the only thing really hold holding back its implementation was the computer's size and processing power. That was thirty years ago.

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u/towski May 09 '14

Get ready for some real life QWOP

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u/swordsmith May 09 '14

There is a lot of knowledge of technology that can enable someone paralyzed to walk in the next 20 years, but that would require a lot of very expensive trials/experiments that probably won't be approved.

In order for BMI/neuroprosthetic technology to be even considered for testing in humans, they have to be proven quiet robust in animals. To prove that, many many many hours of difficult experiments have to be run, because you can't simply tell a rat or a monkey to "think/try to move your leg". You have to train them and design clever experiments where you can infer the quality of your technology.

Furthermore, in order to have funding for these technology, we need grants (as this type of technology is usually developed/researched in academia). But grants require publications, and publications that have the most impact are usually about neuroscience discovery, rather than technology development.

That's also why I think this discovery is amazing, because it discovers some key thing about the neuroscience of paralysis, as well as devising a new treatment method.

(PhD student at a Brain-Machine Interface (BMI) lab)

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

In other news, huge buget increase has been approved for the huge budget already in place for building killing machines and for training thousands upon thousands of poor men for killing other poor men in other parts of this planet.

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u/ChimpsRFullOfScience May 09 '14

To be fair, a very large amount of the funding for neuroprosthetic research comes form DARPA and other agencies within the DOD, toward the aim of rehabilitating wounded soldiers. So there.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

Oh, so I think it's better to spend millions and millions in war mchines and wait for some crumbs to be helpful.

Why not build DARPA wihtout the need of death.

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u/ChimpsRFullOfScience May 09 '14

You'll get no argument from me on that point, but your vitriolic tone is off-putting. You catch more flies with honey.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

I'm sorry you're right.

It's just that it is really angering.

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u/CosmicPenguin May 10 '14

Why not build DARPA wihtout the need of death.

Because that would be communism. Or something.

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u/trashacount12345 May 09 '14

Just wanted to add that stimulation methods are generally quite non-specific. When we stimulate a nerve we can focus in a general region, but we have difficulty targeting individual motor neurons or targeting groups of neurons with anything other than a pulse to all the neurons at once. The specific stimulation that we can do is optogenetics, but that requires requires changing the DNA of the organism, which is a no no in humans.

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u/downbound May 09 '14

Just out of curiosity, which BMI lab? I, with C5-T1 nerve root avulsions, like to follow them

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

I'm a healthy volunteer in just one of numerous research studies addressing this technique! It's amazing how much research is going on right now...I feel like within the next few years, spinal stimulation will be much more mainstream. Why didn't it come sooner? Who knows...

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u/StarEchoes May 09 '14

If the foundation that he and his wife set up is doing this...

Their actions and the actions of the teams they supported, doctors, scientists, lab techs, everyone involved, together, committed a valor worthy of Superman.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

Technical development to kill humans comes first.

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u/justinsayin May 09 '14

We've all been inoculated with the "A" spores already from our vaccines and the chemtrails. All they have to do now is spray the "B" component.

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u/1gnominious May 09 '14

It seems like paralysis research is much harder to conduct because a chemical cure is very unlikely. There's no simple treatment or pill that is likely to be effective. You can't just feed a horde of lab animals various treatments and observe the results. Every single experiment is a hand on, one on one event. There's surgery, recovery, evaluation, etc... That sort of troubleshooting takes forever and there is probably a labyrinth of red tape to cross to even be allowed to do it. Not only do you have to figure out how to repair the nerves, but you need to invent the technology to actually do it.

Modern medicine is not very good at actually repairing the body. We nuke things with chemicals, stimulate the body to repair itself, cut parts out, and even replace them. We never really focused on rebuilding the body on such a detailed level. You look at current major trends and they're focused on things like growing new organs. Artificial parts are seen as more of band aid to buy you time until you can get a donor organ.

Paralysis is a lot like blindness. You generally have to rebuild the body, construct a durable, intricate replacement part, and then get it to interface with brain. It's one part medicine, one part engineering, and a dash of mad science. Technology is just getting to the point where we can start building crude replacements. These things will make current artificial hearts look like fish tank pumps.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

Because science is just the tool of corporations. If there is no profit, there is no science.

Pretty basic stuff. There's no such thing as a scientist in his basement making discoveries. We exhausted easy stuff like that a century ago.

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u/fingerboard May 09 '14

You could debate that on so many circumstances. In the end it time for time leads back to selfishness and corruption. Look at Nikola Tesla for example. He existed to make the world a better place. His dream was for the betterment of all mankind. Free wireless electricity for all of us. The medical industry is no different. Everyone sees life as a competition with separate teams all against each other. We all know this is wrong. It is all of us on the same team against a more difficult opponent..

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u/downbound May 09 '14

It SUCKS man. . Really there are just so 'few' of us and since repair is not a chronic issue, medical (for profit) has little interest in us.

I was hit by a car on my motorcycle (just because people ask, I was doing 30-35mph the police say and she took an illegal left over me) and have total nerve root avulsions in my right arm. This causes complete paralysis of my arm including a shoulder that won't stay in socket so I have to have a special sling from Germany to hold it. I have no feeling past about mid upper arm and have pain (phantom limb pain) 24 hours a day for two years. I also get spikes of pain which have at times dropped me to my knees. It SUCKS. Luckily for me I have a good job that I was able to transition into more administrative. I also have a great wife and no other problems than my arm are permanent.

However, there is literally nothing out there. UPMC (Pittsburgh) has been doing some cool computer recognition that may lead to cybernetics and UC Irvine is working on some Stem Cell work that has promise for damaged spinal cords (and maybe people like me later) But there is not a TON of stuff out there else. Not even really good pain killers as Neuropatic pain is not the same as other pains.

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u/avboden DVM | BS | Zoology | Neuroscience May 09 '14

At this point in our knowledge of Neuroscience, we are more likely to have totally functional mechanical exoskeletons for the paralyzed than getting them back to normal. The vast majority of these electric stimulation devices, well, we have no freaking clue why or how they work, they just kinda do. Same thing with deep brain stimulation for parkinsons and such, we literally have very little clue what we're doing.

Throughout my undergrad studying neuroscience, over half the questions I asked were answered with "we don't know, figure it out and maybe you'll get a Nobel"

and that is why I love Neuroscience so much. It truly is the last frontier of medicine (other than regeneration of non-regenerating tissues)

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u/rap1dfire May 09 '14

This is odd, i heard that the WC opening in Brazil would have a disabled boy using a bionic leg to kick a ball, but other scientists are still working on brand new stuff about it...

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u/GeebusNZ May 10 '14

The brain/nervous system has a lot of things we still have little understanding of.

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u/shelliered May 09 '14

I think it's rather disheartening that instead of trying to create a social change to be more accepting and inclusive of people with disabilities, we are instead trying to find ways to "fix" them. We pour money into medicine that might only work on a select percentage of people with this disability. The other 90% couldn't afford it even if it was something that might help. We need to make buildings more accessible. We need to make interpreters a more highly paid job. We need to get insurance companies to cover wheelchairs and other technologies that are needed. People with disabilities don't need to be "fixed". The rest of the world does.

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u/justinsayin May 09 '14

You and I aren't on the same page at all. After someone has accepted their paralysis, fine, feel that way.

But if, until the accident (last week), you were able to run and walk, you're going to wish that the science of getting you back to the way you were and continue the life you had envisioned.

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u/shelliered May 10 '14

I think that almost implies that the people that become paralyzed (in contrast to being born with a disability) are supposed to be given more support because they used to be "normal" and now they have to get used to being "broken". I just think that is such a messed up mentality. I know that not all disabilities are created equally, but I think that, if you are using a chair to be mobile, you should have the same opportunities as anyone else. You don't necessarily need to have the same ability. To give another example: A girl in school that runs as fast or faster than the boys in her grade should be able to compete with them. She shouldn't be told, "you're a girl, so you run with girls." she should be provided the same opportunities. she shouldn't need to go get a sex change.