The pace of progress in reversing spinal paralysis, a life sentence for most who suffer from it, has been breathtaking. The latest news is the revelation that a man with a severed spine is now walking and driving, but there’s been a steady stream of advances. More than six million Americans live with paralysis, and though we’ve got a long way to go, it seems we could be at a turning point.
Until recently, the hope to move independently again if you were paralyzed seemed an impossible dream. We could only admire how courageously people adapted to their new reality and marvel at the ingenuity of adaptive devices.
But now, several avenues of research have mind-boggling implications.
In June 2014, 29-year-old paraplegic Juliano Pinto kicked off the World Cup wearing a complicated “exoskeleton” controlled by his brain. He managed a small push of the ball, reminiscent of Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for a man.” It was a historic moment that got a bit lost in the frenzy of World Cup Fever.
Developed by Dr. Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University, the suit used the concept of assisted robotics, with Juliano’s brain doing the assisting. The suit took the signals his brain created and sent them to a backpack of electronics, which then relayed them to his legs.
That was impressive enough, but just a few months later there was more news about remarkable progress using another approach—implants that generate those essential electrical impulses. The implants more or less mimic the signals that the brain sends to muscles to make them move. When the spinal cord is damaged or cut, they are short-circuited.
The twist is that Dr. Reggie Edgerton of UCLA, who developed the implants with help from the NIH and the Christopher Reeve Foundation, believes that the spinal cord is underrated. His view is that it can learn without the brain, so that you don’t need the spinal cord-brain connection to move. So the implants deliver signals directly to the spine.
A young man named Rob Summers was the first to try the implants. Rob, a promising athlete likely headed for a pro baseball career, was paralyzed from the chest down at age 21 by a hit-and-run driver in 2011. The implant, or stimulator, was placed over his spinal cord—a risky operation. Since then, his recovery has been nothing short of astounding. It took a lot of hard work and physical therapy, but he can move his legs and has regained sensation even when his stimulator is turned off. He has also regained bladder and bowel control and near normal sexual function. Incredible. Three other men received the stimulators just this year and all were able to move their legs immediately after the procedure.
On January 9th, 2015, researchers at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne announced a new kind of implant that may address some issues with older versions. The new ones are made of a flexible silicone that stops the rubbing and inflammation that can come with a rigid device, and could be longer lasting. To date, they’ve not been tried in humans, but they worked extremely well in paralyzed rats, which are able to run and climb stairs with implants.
In China, 20 paralyzed patients received stem cell transplants and intensive physical therapy. After months of hard work, 15 of them could walk short distances largely unaided and 12 could get in and out of their wheelchairs alone. Even the researchers were surprised.
And then there’s the story of Darek Fidyka, who was stabbed 18 times, severing his spinal cord completely. In 2012, doctors at University College London worked with surgeons at Wroclaw Medical University in Poland and implanted cells into Darek’s spine. They took them from the part of the brain that handles smell, because they regenerate quickly. They put them into the broken ends of Darek’s spine and then they waited. At about the six month mark, the Bulgarian man reported some feeling in his hip and leg muscles. Last fall, the doctors revealed his progress. He now walks with braces and drives his own car. He told the BBC, “When it starts coming back, you feel as if you start living your life again, as if you are born again.”
We know this kind of medical progress is painstaking and that it takes years to make sure new procedures and devices are safe and reliable. But it’s hard not to feel that science is on the road to making many kinds of spinal paralysis a treatable condition. Now that’s amazing.
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