Damaged Spinal Cord "Rewires" Itself With Help of Electrical Stimulation

the_newsbeagle writes: Many prior experiments that tried to restore function after a spinal cord injury have used electrical stimulation to replace the signals from the brain, essentially implanting a replacement nervous system. But a new project instead used electrical stimulation to encourage the natural nervous system to adapt to a severe injury. When researchers repeatedly jolted a rat's damaged spinal cord at the precise moment that it tried to move a paralyzed limb, its nervous system developed new neural pathways that detoured around the site of injury in the spine. Researchers don't think it grew new neurons, but think instead that new connections formed between surviving neurons.

Comments

Mary Shelly was right after all?

[ColdWetDog]

Frankenstein.

Could this be combined with Pig Bladder Powder?

[macs4all]

There is a recent story about a man regrowing a chopped-off fingertip (bone, flesh, fingernail, even fingerprint!) when he put some "extracellular matrix" derived from pig bladder tissue (which is normally a waste product) onto his fingertip-stub.

So, I wonder if this would work with spinal-cord injuries, and possibly enhanced with electrical stimulation.

Re:Could this be combined with Pig Bladder Powder?

[HuntingHades]

The challenge there is actually getting the extra cellular matrix into the spinal cord while avoiding infection and other possible complications.