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

Good news for paraplegic mice!

[LiquidCoooled]

The entire population of paraplegic mice are rejoicing today in the hopes that this news pans out.

Re:Good news for paraplegic mice!

[BVis]

If only your mother had had the foresight to abort YOU.

News flash: that isn't your body or your "kid". You don't like it, write your congressman. If a majority of the people want abortion outlawed, it will be. Until then, you're out of luck. Why don't you ask your imaginary friend Jesus to help you.

Posting under my real login because 1) my karma can take it 2) I'm not a coward.

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

[Wordplay]

Ah, I see he cites that famous source, "a psychological study."

Here's something slightly more specific, with some references.

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1997-03/858984531.Ns.r.html

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

[Yetihehe]

They would try it, but broken spinal cord develops scar tissue that axons can't penetrate.

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.

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.

Yikes

[Nerdposeur]

Wow. It's pretty sick for you to immediately jump from the concept of loving parenting to the concept of child abuse.