Spinal implant taps into the hopes of paraplegics

Four men who had each been paralysed from the chest down for more than two years, and had been told that their situations were hopeless, regained the ability to move their legs and feet after electrical devices were implanted in their spines, researchers reported yesterday.

The restored control was not sufficient to enable them to walk.

The success, albeit in a small number of patients, offers hope that a new treatment can help many of the millions of paralysed people, including those with spinal cord injuries. Even those whose cases are deemed so hopeless that they are not offered further rehabilitation might benefit, scientists say.

"The big message is that people with spinal cord injury of the type these men had no longer need to think they have a lifelong sentence of paralysis," Dr Roderic Pettigrew, director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, part of the National Institutes of Health, in the US, said. He called the development a milestone in spinal cord injury research. His institute partly funded the study, the results of which were published in the journal Brain.

Susan Harkema, a specialist in neurological rehabilitation at the University of Louisville's Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Centre, led the new study.

The research built on the case of a single paralysed patient Harkema's team reported on in 2011. College baseball star Rob Summers had been injured in a hit-and-run accident in 2006 and was paralysed below the neck. In late 2009, Summers received the 72g epidural implant just below the damaged area. Three days later he stood on his own. In 2010 he took his first tentative steps. His partial recovery became a media sensation, but even the Louisville team thought epidural stimulation could benefit only spinal cord patients who had retained some sensation, as Summers did.

"We assumed the surviving sensory pathways were crucial for this recovery," Harkema said.

She and her team had little hope for two of their next patients. Neither had sensation in their paralysed legs.

One was Kent Stephenson, paralysed in a 2009 motocross crash when he was 21. After months of rehab in Colorado "they said I would never move my legs again and there was no hope", he said.

Eleven days after the stimulator was implanted, Stephenson moved his "paralysed" left leg.

Andrew Meas, whose head-on collision with a car while he was on his motorcycle in 2006 left him paralysed from the chest down, made even more progress.

He can move even when the stimulator is not emitting signals.

After months of rehab "I can pick up both my legs without the stimulator on, and can stand without it.

"My standing record is 27 minutes and I'm still progressing."