Electric pulses may restore movement in people with broken necks.
Patients with spinal injuries have been shown to improve best soon after their injury. Those chosen for the study had their accidents between 1 and 34 years ago, with little or no improvement since their initial recovery.
Mariel Purcell, director of research of the Scottish Centre for Innovation in Spinal Cord Injury at Queen Elizabeth University hospital in Glasgow, has been treating Melanie ever since her injury 14 years ago.
Her unit was invited onto the study because it is a world-leading research centre in the field.
She said she’s never seen such progress with an injury sustained such a long time before.
“At the moment there isn’t any single drug or device that’s been approved and is of clinical benefit to patients,” she said.
The device is the latest development of work by a Swiss team, co-led by Prof Gregoire Courtine of the EPFL medical research lab in Lausanne. So far, they’ve helped 26 people with spinal injuries below the neck walk again using surgically implanted devices stimulating the spine – but so far only in lab tests.
The new system, which requires no surgery, is also the team’s first effort to find a treatment for people with broken necks, who have lost movement in their arms.
Prof Courtine has published evidence that electrical stimulation coupled with physiotherapy does result in some limited repair of the damaged nerves.
“We are so close to bringing life changing technology to these patients,” he told BBC News.
The US regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is studying the data from the clinical study, which has been published in the journal Nature Medicine, external, to assess whether the technique is safe and the benefit is significant.
If the agency is satisfied, it will issue a licence for a medical device based on the technology, developed by a commercial spinoff company, to be used to treat tetraplegics in American hospitals.
If the device gets the go ahead in the US, then the team behind the technology will apply for its use in other parts of the world.
