Introduction

Stimulating damaged spines rewires rats for recovery

Stimulating damaged spines rewires rats for recovery

A study by Dr Steve Perlmutter and his colleagues at the University of Washington suggests that precisely controlled electrical stimulation can encourage the nervous system to create detours around a SCI lesion, allowing commands to get through from brain to muscles.

The key advance here is a new triggering technique. The researchers used a device called the neurochip-2, which recorded the weak electrical signal from attempts to use paralysed limb muscles and used that signal as the cue to initiate a pulse of electrical stimulation in the spinal cord. When the attempted muscle movement was synchronized with neural stimulation, the researchers believe that surviving neurons in the spinal cord formed new connections linking the muscles to the brain’s motor control region.

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