Robotic Devices Helping Paraplegic Patients
Robotic Devices Helping Paraplegics – A New Study Shows
I’m Ed Smith, a Sacramento Spinal Cord Injury Attorney. Around 25 million people in the world today suffer from severe spinal injuries, millions more than the population of any of the
globe’s largest metropolises. Many of them are partially or completely paralyzed and successful, mobility regaining treatments can be quite rare. A recent study led by Dr. Miguel
Nicolelis of Duke University, however, might point to a brighter future for some of these patients.
Brain Training Exercises Using Robotic Devices
Nicolelis spent a year treating eight paraplegics, all of whom had been paralyzed for several years or more. His innovative approach centered on brain training exercises using robotic
devices and virtual reality programs, designed in the hope of reviving damaged tissue. A similar strategy focused and technologyassisted practice of certain skills has shown
promise for victims of stroke in the past. As long as any healthy nerve fibers remain, even very severely injured patients can often regain significant feeling, and, in the best cases,
control over their muscles.
Watch Youtube Video below to learn more about Nicolelsis’s study:
Daily Quality of Life Improved for Participants
The results? While none of Nicolelis’s patients responded so successfully to the therapy as to be able to hold their full body weight with their legs again, the “partial recovery” which
Nicolelis indicates his patients experienced has still done much to improve the daily quality and ease of life of the participants. One of his patients, a pregnant woman, became able to
feel her contractions for the very first time, an experience which convinced her to have her baby delivered nonsurgically. Another, nearly completely paralyzed for a decade, has
regained the ability to sit down and even to drive an automobile. Several of Nicolelis’s subjects saw sufficient improvement in their sensation and movement to have their condition
reclassified as only “incomplete paraplegia”.
Many Treatments Being Researched Are Very Cost Intensive
Many of the treatments currently being researched and applied to spinal cord injury victims are extremely cost intensive, and, in some cases, experimental and potentially laden with
unseen complications. These include attempts to reconfigure and retrain the CNS using electrical signals and the transplantation of donor cells. Nicolelis emphasizes the possibility
of a virtual realitybased approach eventually bringing costs down dramatically, as well as the complete lack of almost any negative side effects or unknown quantities at play.
Still, some experts question the merit of Nicolelis’s dramatic language regarding his treatment. Though Dr. Nicolelis claims that the sort and level of improvements his patients
experienced has “never been seen before” and refers to his method as “an important milestone”, Edelle FieldFote of Emory University is less convinced, dismissing notions that
the research is “unprecedented”. FieldFote points out that virtually anyone with a full year of such intensive treatment would be bound to “see improvement”.
Others have alluded to the difficulty of drawing firm conclusions from Nicolelis’s publication, for a variety of reasons. The participants in the study had many different types of
interventions, a fact which makes narrowing in on which treatments were truly effective and which were not harrowing if not impossible. In addition, Nicolelis included no control group
in the study, whether a group of patients receiving more common treatments or going untreated. This makes comparison impossible.
Looking Forward to Second Study Group and More Advancements in Patient Sensation and Control
Dr. Nicolelis remains confident in the advances he’s made in his patients’ sensation and control, and will be widening his work to a second study group in the near
future.
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Source of Robotic Devices Helping Paraplegic Patients – http://www.local10.com/health/paraplegics-moving-again-years-after-spinal-cord-injuries