hand mobility, enabling people affected by moderate to severe stroke to
conduct their normal daily activities more easily, report experts.
A pair of thin metal electrodes resembling strands of spaghetti implanted
along the neck engage intact neural circuits, allowing stroke patients to
fully open and close their fist, lift their arm above their head or use a
fork and knife to cut a piece of steak for the first time in years.
“We discovered that electrical stimulation of specific spinal cord regions
enables patients to move their arm in ways that they are not able to do
without the stimulation. Perhaps even more interesting, we found that after
a few weeks of use, some of these improvements endure when the stimulation
is switched off, indicating exciting avenues for the future of stroke
therapies,” said Marco Capogrosso, Ph.D., assistant professor of
neurological surgery.
Thanks to years of preclinical research building up to this point, we
have developed a practical, easy-to-use stimulation protocol adapting
existing FDA-approved clinical technologies that could be easily translated
to the hospital and quickly moved from the lab to the clinic.
