Sitting in an exam room, surrounded by doctors and scientists, Heather Rendulic opened her left hand for the first time since suffering a series of strokes nine years earlier when she was in her early 20s.
“It was an amazing feeling for me to be able to do that again,” Rendulic says. “It’s not something I ever thought was possible.”
But immediately after a surgically implanted device sent electrical pulses into her spinal cord, Rendulic could not only open her hand but also showed other marked improvements in arm mobility, researchers report February 20 in Nature Medicine. “We all started crying,” Marco Capogrosso, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh, said in a February 15 news conference. “We didn’t really expect this could work as fast as that.”
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The approach is similar to that recently used for patients paralyzed by spinal cord injuries (SN: 08/03/22). It represents a promising new technique for restoring voluntary movement to those left with upper-body paralysis following strokes, the team says.
A stroke occurs when blood supply to parts of the brain is cut off, often causing short-term or long-term issues with movement, speech and vision. Stroke is a leading, and often underappreciated, cause of paralysis; in the United States alone, 5 million people are living with some form of motor deficit due to stroke. While physical therapy can provide some improvements, no treatment exists to help these patients regain full control of their limbs — and their lives.
Strokes cause paralysis because the connection between the brain and the spinal cord is damaged; the brain tries to tell the spinal cord to move certain muscles, but the message is muddled.
So, taking…
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