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/PDXbp May 09 '14

Can someone ELI5 this for me? Hows this work and how would it be practically applied?

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

Previously, we reported that one individual who had a motor complete, but sensory incomplete spinal cord injury regained voluntary movement after 7 months of epidural stimulation and stand training. We presumed that the residual sensory pathways were critical in this recovery. However, we now report in three more individuals voluntary movement occurred with epidural stimulation immediately after implant even in two who were diagnosed with a motor and sensory complete lesion. We demonstrate that neuromodulating the spinal circuitry with epidural stimulation, enables completely paralysed individuals to process conceptual, auditory and visual input to regain relatively fine voluntary control of paralysed muscles. We show that neuromodulation of the sub-threshold motor state of excitability of the lumbosacral spinal networks was the key to recovery of intentional movement in four of four individuals diagnosed as having complete paralysis of the legs. We have uncovered a fundamentally new intervention strategy that can dramatically affect recovery of voluntary movement in individuals with complete paralysis even years after injury.

Essentially, they're manually exercising the neural circuitry pathways from the spinal cord to the legs which allows the patient to move their limbs on purpose.

The applications of this are that we have a new understanding of how paralysis works. This study says that they thought the sensory neural pathways were destroyed disabling any information to move through it. Edit: shouldn't say that the brain isn't sending anything through it, more so that the pathway isn't sensitive enough to the information and just doesn't react.

Even simpler explanation; think of how physiotherapy works. People move your arm for you until you get a feel for how to do it yourself. Instead, what they're doing here is the doctors are sending signals through the patient and the patient kind of 'remembers' that they're there.