Four Paralyzed Men Moved Their Legs Again Thanks to a New Device

Four men who suffered complete spinal cord injuries and were unable to move from the waist down have just moved voluntarily for the first time since their accidents, thanks to a new device that mimics the signals the brain normally sends throughout the body.

Though the patients aren’t up and walking, they are able to voluntarily move their legs, hips, and toes thanks to the device, which was implanted on each patient’s spinal cord and constantly sends an electrical current through the spine. Each patient was paralyzed in car or motorcycle accidents—two of them had no sensation beneath the waist.

It’s not the first time the electrode device has worked—in a 2011 article in the Lancet, researcher Susan Howley wrote about the success of the device in one patient, but Howley has now proved that the process is replicable and might eventually allow people who were once fully paralyzed to live relatively normal lives. Howley published this latest study in the journal Brain and said that the fact the therapy worked on all four patients who tried it bodes well for the future.

“We can now envision a day where epidural stimulation might be part of a cocktail of therapies used to treat paralysis,” she said. “At the present time, other than standard medical care, there are no effective evidence-based treatments for chronic spinal cord injury.”

Over the course of treatment, each patient improved to the point where less electrical current was needed to stimulate movement, and all four of the men were able to support at least some weight thanks to the device. That leads Howley and others involved in the project to suggest that, eventually, these patients might walk again. The long-term goal is to get them to walk on a treadmill, where the sensation of the moving belt might help speed up the process.

Reggie Edgerton, a researcher at UCLA, said that, as the trial went on, the brain was potentially able to send signals to places where it hadn’t been before: "The circuitry in the spinal cord is remarkably resilient. Once you get them up and active, many physiological systems that are intricately connected and that were dormant come back into play,” he said.

The team is currently working with mice to determine if more fine motor skills can be regained using this technology, and they’re also doing research to see if a similar method could be used to treat patients who are paralyzed from the neck down.

Much research around spinal cord injuries is focused on re-growing the nerve cells that were damaged using stem cells—a process that has shown some success but still hasn’t been fully translated to humans. Ultimately, that may be the “cure” for paralysis, but, until then, this epidural offers a promising alternative, Edgerton said.

“We don't have to necessarily rely on regrowth of nerves in order to regain function,” he said. “The fact that we've observed this in all four patients suggests that this is actually a common phenomenon in those with complete paralysis."