A 54-year-old patient who became paraplegic in 2006 after a skiing accident causing spinal cord injury, regained the ability to walk. To understand this phenomenon, you need to know that walking requires the brain to transmit electrical signals to the spinal cordlocated at the base of the skull, which distributes these signals to all the nerves in the body. A section of the cord causes more or less significant paralysis depending on the level of the lesion.
The higher the section, the more serious the damage.. If it is located at the base of the skull, it can be fatal because the respiratory centers are affected. A little further down, this results in quadriplegia, where arms and legs are paralyzed. Even further down is paraplegia, with only the legs affected.
How did the neurosurgeons manage to get the patient to walk again?
If the cord is cut, certain nerve fibers may remain present but inactive. Researchers discovered that by stimulating the hypothalamus, a part of the brain, they could reactivate these fibers, allowing the patient to walk again.. He obviously needed physiotherapy, but he was in a wheelchair. He now walks and even climbs stairs.
This medical advance is all the more remarkable as the intervention is carried out without general anesthesia. The patient remains conscious, because the stimulation aims to restore motor skills without affecting other brain areas, such as language. With local anesthesia, as soon as the hypothalamus is stimulated, the patient feels the urge to walk.
The next step is to combine this new approach of stimulating the hypothalamus with an existing technique of stimulating the spinal cord, in order to improve the recovery of patients suffering from spinal cord injuries. We can imagine that tomorrow, more and more paraplegic and why not quadriplegic patients will regain the use of their limbs.. It’s not science fiction, it’s science. This is real hope.
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