Every day after a spinal cord injury is difficult.
but this injury is more disruption of communication
than it is a complete devastation of function.
We really thought
our brain just tells our muscles what to do, right?
Our spinal cord's just a conduit of information,
but we've shown is that's not the case.
If we could put a stimulator in there,
we can reverse the injuries that we have to the spinal cord
and get closer and closer
to what you might end up calling a cure.
- This number's 215815.
- On the thing you sent me was three.
- Two to three, right?
Okay, that's fine.
- It's general practice right now
where if you're completely paralyzed,
you don't really get much rehab
'cause there's no sense in doing it.
We found that our assumption is not accurate.
I started in this area 25 years ago
and we know in all other species
that there is a set of networks
in the spinal cord that control locomotion.
It's not the brain, it's the spinal cord,
so the research question was,
do humans have the sophistication in these networks
in the spinal cord?
We did very meticulous, tedious experiments
and you could see locomotive patterns in the spinal cord.
We said okay, if we could activate people
with complete spinal cord injuries and see those patterns
possibly we could get them to take independent steps again.
- Point three, okay, work on that left leg.
- Toe up, toe up, toe up, there you go, little bit more.
- So he's actually receiving stimulation through
his epidural implant.
The stimulation
is raising the excitability of the spinal cord
and what the trainers are doing is providing sensory cues
that also the spinal cord is able to interpret.
So all that information is integrated
and eventually the spinal cord starts relearning
and remembering all those things that it was able to do
prior to the injury.
- This is the stimulator that we use.
This flat portion is what we call the paddle electrode,
that's the portion that goes right on top of the spinal cord
to activate the nerves.
We make our incision from the lower thoracic
to the upper lumbar area.
Generally spans about two vertebrae.
Then we connect it to the battery.
The current of the battery is Bluetooth activated,
so you can control the voltage, the intensity of stimulation
the battery then sends electrical impulses
to the electrode,
which is sitting right on top of the spinal cord.
- Is that on two minutes or one minute?
- Uh, two minutes.
- All right, let's go ahead and put it on one minute.
- Two on one.
- We train people at motor complete injuries,
which mean you couldn't detect any signals from the brain
and one of them was Jeff.
- I got the implant about four and a half years ago.
I've really tried hard to not come in with too many expectations
'cause when you first get injured
and they kind of assess how injured you are
and they pretty much say
don't expect to get anything else from this,
it's a permanent injury.
- Jeff had a very high spinal cord injury.
So he has not only impairment of his legs,
but his trunk and his arms and his hands.
So what happened with the stimulator
is he learned to walk over ground, with only balance-assist.
We were pretty surprised by that.
He also has more strength in his trunk, in his arms
and in his hands,
so that also shows us,
that the whole circuitry is being activated
to contribute to this task of walking.
- I'm not going to be able to do this.
One, two.
(grunting)
Just got easier over time.
The nervousness is gone.
That level of confidence,
just being able to do something
as simple as stand up on my own
is a big motivator
to find out what else I can do.
- And to your left and we can turnaround.
My left. -Yeah.
- Try to step backwards.
- The impact is tremendous, I mean this is a game changer.
It's not just locomotion that you can activate,
but you can also reactivate bladder, bowel
and blood pressure regulation.
Once this has gotten into the clinics and is used,
it's gonna be a significant impact
in the health and quality of life
of spinal cord injury patients.
- It's important to understand that at this point
it is really a research study,
but people with motor complete injuries
could be functionally better
anywhere from 40 to 90-percent soon,
like soon they can do that.
So I think we really need to rethink
how we're providing care for people
after spinal cord injury.
We haven't found anyone
who actually has what has been thought of
as a complete injury or completely paralyzed.
They can still recover.
- Thanks for watching this episode of Superhuman.
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