Scientists Restore Walking After Spinal Cord Injury

Spinal cord damage blocks the routes that the brain uses to send messages to the nerve cells that control walking. Until now, doctors believed that the only way for injured patients to walk again was to re-grow the long nerve highways that link the brain and base of the spinal cord. For the first time, a UCLA study shows that the central nervous system can reorganize itself and follow new pathways to restore the cellular communication required for movement. The lead researcher said, "This pessimistic view [that severe injury to the spinal cord means permanent paralysis] has changed over my lifetime, and our findings add to a growing body of research showing that the nervous system can reorganize after injury."

Comments

Anecdote

[Alioth]

An anecdote about nerve re-routing...

When I was 15, I had an accident (put my hand through a glass door, the glass cut through my wrist clean to the bone taking out all the tendons as well as the median nerve, that runs roughly up the middle of the front of the wrist and supplies the thumb, finger 2 and half of finger 3 and part of the palm with sensation).

To repair all the damage, it took 6.5 hours of microsurgery. The nerve took several months to fully regrow.

When it did, the sensation came out in all the wrong places - if I touched part of one finger, the sensation would come out somewhere else, for instance on another finger or somewhere more or less random in the affected area of the hand. But within a few months, the brain had "rerouted" everything, and the sensations gradually started coming out in the right place.

Re:Anecdote

[arivanov]

Nothing so anecdotal about it. It is a well known fact that during microsurgery the nerves are reconnected in nearly random order and the brain has to readjust after that which it does amazingly well (so much for the precoception that it is set in stone which is also mentioned in the article).

What I could never understand is why doctors never try similar techniques on spinal injuries. If you perform this type of surgery within the first couple of hours after the accident it should have the same chance of success as reconnecting a finger or even a limb. IIRC An axon in the hand is no different from an axon in the spinal column. If you can reconnect them in the limb what exactly prevents from reconnecting them in the spinal column (besides the complexity of opening it)?

Similarly, what exactly prevents from taking a chunk of nerve from somewhere, reconnecting the ends via microsurgery and implanting it bang in the middle of the broken part of the spinal column again via microsurgery?

Re:Anecdote

[Sirch]

IANASS (spinal surgeon), but the spinal cord is so dense with nerves that I'd be surprised if they could take the risk - random signals to/from the hand are one thing, but imagine the havoc that could be wreaked with all of the vital systems below the waist if you had random connections all over the place...

Re:Anecdote

[petermgreen]

The question is whether there is such a thing as a matched nerve map in the first place or if the nerve map we get from birth is itself basically random.

Re:Anecdote

[ozmanjusri]

Different I/O port but same phenomenon.

It's sounds like a related phenomenon.

In the late '80s I did a lot of gridding with Wild T1A theodolites, which reverse the image both laterally and vertically. We'd spend about 10 hours a day looking through the jigger with brief breaks in between.

For the first day or two, I had to make a conscious mental correction for the reversal and made a lot of transformation mistakes, but on the second day got to the stage where the view through the scope looked upright and moved on its correct axis. The transition between normal and reversed viewing was still hard hard, to the extent that I refused to drive a vehicle after a day's work. In about a week though, transitioning between worlds became effortless.

That was fine until I took a break for two weeks. When I got back, the disorientation happened again and the adaptation cycle restarted. Makes me wonder how stressful it is to the brain to rewire like that. There must be a reason it reverts if the ability isn't used.

I learned to scuba dive with quadriplegics

[MichaelCrawford]

... and paraplegics. To qualify for the class, the disabled students had to have just enough arm control to plug their nose, which is needed to "clear" their ears, that is, adjust the pressure inside the ear drum to the water pressure outside.

Two of us fully-abled people would buddy with the disabled divers. We'd pull them around the ocean floor.

I found it quite an eye-opening experience.

One of the students was my quadriplegic friend Foster Anderson, who was injured in a motorcycle accident as a teenager. I haven't seen him for a while, but he used to commute from Santa Cruz to Silicon Valley in a special van to work as an engineer. He can just control his arms, but not his fingers.

I understand he once appeared on the cover of a surfing magazine, riding a surfboard.

I also read in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience that a study of Italian paraplegics found the unanimous opinion that becoming disabled was the best thing that ever happened to them: before their injuries, they failed to fully appreciate their lives. Afterwards they were able to live far more rich and rewarding lives, because they understood better just how precious the gift of life is.

Don't write off the disabled. They - we, rather, as I myself have a profoundly serious mental illness - are capable of far more than most of society gives us credit for.

Think of that next time you park illegally in a handicapped spot. (Foster saw someone do that at a restaurant once, and started repeatedly ramming the car with his electric wheelchair!)

Right-side-up vision is learned, not hardwired

[MichaelCrawford]

I read in Scientific American that some guy wore special glasses for several weeks that turned his field of view upside-down.

After a while, everything began to appear right-side-up to him when he wore the glasses, so much so that he was able to ride a motorcycle while wearing them!

Re:Right-side-up vision is learned, not hardwired

[theheadlessrabbit]

I have personally met a person who had done this experiment.

At the time, is was a graduate student, working with University of Toronto's Steve Mann. (one of the world's 1st cyborgs) His setup consisted of LCD goggles, and video cameras attached to his head.

After 2 weeks of living life upside down, he said it became 'normal'. your brain flips it right-side up automatically.

he experimented with many other angles, giving each angle 2 weeks.
He found that it was very easy to adjust to 90 degree angles. (1 week or less) 45 degree angles took longer to get used to, but his brain would eventually get it, but anything else, like 33 degrees, just made him feel very sick.

That was 6-7 years ago.

Re:Right-side-up vision is learned, not hardwired

[squiggleslash]

As a bizarrely related anecdote, when I moved to the US from Britain, I found that, after a few months, I had some difficulty with the concepts of left and right. Not only did I often use the wrong word for the direction (and believe there to be no mistake until I thought about it), but even my memories often had sides switched that didn't make any sense.

Why? Well, I was used to driving on the left side of the road (or more being a passenger on vehicles on the left; I didn't drive much in the UK), and then had to switch to right-side driving when I moved to the US. That might sound minor, but the same issues also affected such simple tasks as crossing the road and knowing which direction to look for traffic in. From what I can figure out, my brain over-compensated.

Re:Right-side-up vision is learned, not hardwired

[bdcrazy]

The brain is scary. Your vision by itself is very limited. It appears the brain has circuits for finding lines/patterns/faces/etc from the impulses your eyes send. Also, your brain/optic nerve/eyeball all seem to do a lot of pre and post processing on everything. Another scary insight into this is things like habits. I have taken the train to work for 8 years. I always pull left out of my driveway to get to the train station. Even when I should turn right, i almost invariably turn left and have to turn around. Somehow your brain gets used to doing things. What is even more scary is driving to work, then not recalling yourself waking up and getting yourself there. For instance, I worked at a concrete product factory one summer. It was about an hour drive away. A few mornings the first memory I could recall was seeing the company parking lot or punching my card in the timeclock. Now that is scary.

Learning to walk again

[JeepFanatic]

My girlfriend once was a professional skiier. She had an accident that left her in a wheelchair for two years. She has some form of paralasis where she cannot feel anything in her legs other than vibrations which travel up her bones. She learned how to walk by feeling the vibration of the floor under her feet. I don't quite understand all of it but it's really amazing. The only time she has problems with this though is on surfaces that absorb the vibration. Then she looks like she's drunk.

Get to the human testing already!

[Bones3D_mac]

God, this crap is irritating to read about... especially when half your body doesn't work because of problems like this. Here I am watching the last of my youth drain away with ideas I'll never see come to fruition, while they frustratingly dangle this damned carrot in my face.

Sure, I know there's risks involved in rushing into human testing in medicine, before a complete study on other animals has been completed. But, you know... some things are worth taking the extra risk for!

So how about offering up guinea pig slots for those of us with not much else left to lose?