Scientists Restore Walking After Spinal Cord Injury

Spinal cord damage blocks the routes that the brain uses to send messages to the nerve cells that control walking. Until now, doctors believed that the only way for injured patients to walk again was to re-grow the long nerve highways that link the brain and base of the spinal cord. For the first time, a UCLA study shows that the central nervous system can reorganize itself and follow new pathways to restore the cellular communication required for movement. The lead researcher said, "This pessimistic view [that severe injury to the spinal cord means permanent paralysis] has changed over my lifetime, and our findings add to a growing body of research showing that the nervous system can reorganize after injury."

Good news for paraplegic mice!

[LiquidCoooled (634315)]

The entire population of paraplegic mice are rejoicing today in the hopes that this news pans out.

Keep on forking in the real world

[Sciryl Llort (1160727)]

One more heart that was stopped. Two more eyes that will never see. Two more hands that will never touch. Two more legs that will never run. One more mouth that will never speak.

It's one more kid that'll never go to school
That'll never fall in love never get to be coooo-oool.

Re:Good news for paraplegic mice!

[BVis (267028)]

If only your mother had had the foresight to abort YOU.

News flash: that isn't your body or your "kid". You don't like it, write your congressman. If a majority of the people want abortion outlawed, it will be. Until then, you're out of luck. Why don't you ask your imaginary friend Jesus to help you.

Posting under my real login because 1) my karma can take it 2) I'm not a coward.

Re:Good news for paraplegic mice!

[gstoddart (321705)]

If a majority of the people want abortion outlawed, it will be. Until then, you're out of luck.

Let's hope not. See, ideally certain things should be defined as the rights of the individual involved, and not part of greater society's business. In this case, reproductive freedoms of the women.

I'd certainly like to think that a simple majority could never vote to re-enact slavery, or not allowing Jews or women to vote, or racially mixed marriages -- because, it's not simply a matter of the will of the majority. "We hold these rights to be inalienable" and all that jazz.

As much as people in the US would like to overturn Roe v Wade, one would hope that the judiciary would remember the points involved in the case. There are broader issues involved.

Cheers

Re:

[somersault (912633)]

By the sounds of it, so are you.

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[khellendros1984 (792761)]

Please, don't bring this shit up. It's a debate that goes in circles and never finds a solution that's to anyone's satisfaction.

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[PopeRatzo (965947)]

Friend, the only magical thing that happens is that the fetus goes from being completely within the mother's body, with every single one of the fetus's biological processes regulated and supplied by the mother, to being outside the mother's body, breathing on it's own, an "individual", a "person" for the first time. As someone who watched his daughter being born, I can tell you it's a very important moment. Oh, it's wonderful to see that ultrasound, but is it a person? Nunh-uh.

In my view, the state of bei

Re:

[Afecks (899057)]

Actually this is a distraction from the real argument.

What we should be asking isn't "when does life begin" but rather "can we force someone to be responsible for another's well being".

When people are brain dead we bury them in the ground or cremate them. We no longer treat them as we would any other person. Recognizing how we treat someone after they've stopped thinking, what's the practical difference in how we treat someone before they start thinking?

If the word "potential" is entering your mind, conside

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[Dcnjoe60 (682885)]

If the word "potential" is entering your mind, consider this. Thanks to modern science and cloning, every cell on your body is capable of turning into a complete human. Everytime you scratch an itch or jerk off in the shower you are committing a virtual holocaust.

Not to pick nits, but what you are depositing in the shower is not capable of turning into a complete human being as it only has half the chromosomes needed to do so.

Blastocysts have 150 cells, a fly's brain has over 100,000. There is no brain, there is nothing recognizable. If you think this spec of cells has a soul already then how do you explain when it splits and make twins? Is it 1 soul in 2 bodies, half a soul in each? Or is it obvious that this metaphysics of souls in a petri dish is kind of silly?

If you are using the concept of a soul for your argument, you should be careful as it disproves your point. Religions that hold to the concept of a soul hold that twins both have an individual soul - the second one being infused when the cells separate to form the twin. Geography wouldn't make a difference as to that infusion - whether the

Re:

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop (649296)]

Then why did you respond and insist there was a natural right and tell me that's "the way the system works" and such when I asked "as in nature, biology"? The "natural right" that you now refer to simply reinforces what I've been saying. From the article you refernce:

A natural right is a universal right that is seen as inherent in the nature

Key words there being is seen as - as seen by US. Obviously "seen as" is subjective and varies over time and among societies.

It's irrelevent to the discussion at hand, w

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[Afecks (899057)]

To value merely being alive over the freedom to make choices is to make being alive worthless. I'd rather be dead than existing solely as a breeding machine for the state.

Re:"Pro-life" platform:

[sm62704 (957197)]

Better yet don't vote for either wing of the Corporate party. I split my vote between the ultimate pro-choicers (Libertarians) and the Geens.

A vote for a candidate who will pass laws for the corporations and against you is worse than a wasted vote. As I like to smoke put and bang hookers [slashdot.org] a vote for a Democrat or Republican is a vote for my own incarceration. As someone's sig says, "oh look, my tax dollars at work coming to arrest me!"

Anecdote

[Alioth (221270)]

An anecdote about nerve re-routing...

When I was 15, I had an accident (put my hand through a glass door, the glass cut through my wrist clean to the bone taking out all the tendons as well as the median nerve, that runs roughly up the middle of the front of the wrist and supplies the thumb, finger 2 and half of finger 3 and part of the palm with sensation).

To repair all the damage, it took 6.5 hours of microsurgery. The nerve took several months to fully regrow.

When it did, the sensation came out in all the wrong places - if I touched part of one finger, the sensation would come out somewhere else, for instance on another finger or somewhere more or less random in the affected area of the hand. But within a few months, the brain had "rerouted" everything, and the sensations gradually started coming out in the right place.

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[WK2 (1072560)]

I think your brain is compensating for a mismatched nerve map. Your sensations appear to be coming from the right place only because you know where they are supposed to be coming from.

Re:Anecdote

[petermgreen (876956)]

The question is whether there is such a thing as a matched nerve map in the first place or if the nerve map we get from birth is itself basically random.

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[Yetihehe (971185)]

It is basically random. It is recommended to touch and massage toddlers so they can develop better sense of their bodies.

Re:Anecdote

[Frnknstn (663642)]

Is that what you told the feds when they busted you for being a pedo?

Yikes

[Nerdposeur (910128)]

Wow. It's pretty sick for you to immediately jump from the concept of loving parenting to the concept of child abuse.

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[Lord Apathy (584315)]

Actually he is not far off base but most of the time it's not the feds, it's the local 5'o that overreacts. There was a case where a local family took some pictures of dad playing with his 3 and 5 year old daughters. He was tickling them doing that blowing on the belly thing.

The pictures where processed and since the pictures contained nude children the local police were called. That afternoon the children were taken by child custody and the parents were arrested for child molestation and production

Right-side-up vision is learned, not hardwired

[MichaelCrawford (610140)]

I read in Scientific American that some guy wore special glasses for several weeks that turned his field of view upside-down.

After a while, everything began to appear right-side-up to him when he wore the glasses, so much so that he was able to ride a motorcycle while wearing them!

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[jacquesm (154384)]

Imagine the confusion when you then take them off and everything is inverted !
I don't think it would pay to see how many of those cycles you can go through before you develop appreciable lag, I think that such 'reroutings' work by additions only, never by deletions.

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[dintech (998802)]

I think it's more of an upsertion. :P Or is that indation... What's the word that means means 'insert or update'?

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[Ihlosi (895663)]

I read in Scientific American that some guy wore special glasses for several weeks that turned his field of view upside-down.

Actually, the lens in your eye projects an upside-down image on the retina. So, the special glasses actually made the image appear "right side up" on the retina.

Re:Right-side-up vision is learned, not hardwired

[theheadlessrabbit (1022587)]

I have personally met a person who had done this experiment.

At the time, is was a graduate student, working with University of Toronto's Steve Mann. (one of the world's 1st cyborgs) His setup consisted of LCD goggles, and video cameras attached to his head.

After 2 weeks of living life upside down, he said it became 'normal'. your brain flips it right-side up automatically.

he experimented with many other angles, giving each angle 2 weeks.
He found that it was very easy to adjust to 90 degree angles. (1 week or less) 45 degree angles took longer to get used to, but his brain would eventually get it, but anything else, like 33 degrees, just made him feel very sick.

That was 6-7 years ago.

Re:Right-side-up vision is learned, not hardwired

[squiggleslash (241428)]

As a bizarrely related anecdote, when I moved to the US from Britain, I found that, after a few months, I had some difficulty with the concepts of left and right. Not only did I often use the wrong word for the direction (and believe there to be no mistake until I thought about it), but even my memories often had sides switched that didn't make any sense.

Why? Well, I was used to driving on the left side of the road (or more being a passenger on vehicles on the left; I didn't drive much in the UK), and then had to switch to right-side driving when I moved to the US. That might sound minor, but the same issues also affected such simple tasks as crossing the road and knowing which direction to look for traffic in. From what I can figure out, my brain over-compensated.

Re:Right-side-up vision is learned, not hardwired

[Lord Apathy (584315)]

Your brain compensates for flaws in your vision more than people think. People would be suprised how shitty their eyes really are and how much the brain makes up for it. I saw a show on the discovery channel. It illistrated how your vision, esp. behind your optic nerve, has holes in it. They demonstrated how much your brain just fills in that part by what it thinks should go there.

it was pretty amazing, and pretty scary. i had to drive the next day.

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[bdcrazy (817679)]

The brain is scary. Your vision by itself is very limited. It appears the brain has circuits for finding lines/patterns/faces/etc from the impulses your eyes send. Also, your brain/optic nerve/eyeball all seem to do a lot of pre and post processing on everything. Another scary insight into this is things like habits. I have taken the train to work for 8 years. I always pull left out of my driveway to get to the train station. Even when I should turn right, i almost invariably turn left and have to tu

Re:Anecdote

[arivanov (12034)]

Nothing so anecdotal about it. It is a well known fact that during microsurgery the nerves are reconnected in nearly random order and the brain has to readjust after that which it does amazingly well (so much for the precoception that it is set in stone which is also mentioned in the article).

What I could never understand is why doctors never try similar techniques on spinal injuries. If you perform this type of surgery within the first couple of hours after the accident it should have the same chance of success as reconnecting a finger or even a limb. IIRC An axon in the hand is no different from an axon in the spinal column. If you can reconnect them in the limb what exactly prevents from reconnecting them in the spinal column (besides the complexity of opening it)?

Similarly, what exactly prevents from taking a chunk of nerve from somewhere, reconnecting the ends via microsurgery and implanting it bang in the middle of the broken part of the spinal column again via microsurgery?

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[Sirch (82595)]

IANASS (spinal surgeon), but the spinal cord is so dense with nerves that I'd be surprised if they could take the risk - random signals to/from the hand are one thing, but imagine the havoc that could be wreaked with all of the vital systems below the waist if you had random connections all over the place...

Re:Anecdote

[Yetihehe (971185)]

They would try it, but broken spinal cord develops scar tissue [nih.gov] that axons can't penetrate.

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[FinchWorld (845331)]

My very basic understanding is that due to density and risk of scar tissue you could cause even more damage.

Re:Anecdote

[BESTouff (531293)]

I know that one ! (My stepfather used to work in that field)
Spinal cord injuries may be repaired (even self heal) when you're harmed in the higher part of the spinal cord, near the brain. Counterintuitively, when it's cut near the bottom, it's nearly always definitive. Why ? Because the irrigation system is way more fragile in the lower part, and that's often where the problem is. When part of the spinal cord doesn't receive blood anymore, necrosis happens fast and then you can't do anything anymore.

Re:Anecdote

[bytesex (112972)]

Your self-image, the precise volume that you occupy in space and how it's organized, is one of the most important aspects of your consciousness. It allows you to navigate past a table in the hallway and miss it by a fraction of a centimeter. It's also very dynamic; after all - people change when they grow. Damage to that area of the brain is debilitating; not just phantom-phenomena (pains), but there are people who cannot move a leg if they don't see it. Others imagine that the person in the mirror is someone else.

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[ultranova (717540)]

Your self-image, the precise volume that you occupy in space and how it's organized, is one of the most important aspects of your consciousness. It allows you to navigate past a table in the hallway and miss it by a fraction of a centimeter.

That's nothing. Truck drivers regularly miss me by a fraction of a centimeter on public roads.

Re:Anecdote

[ashitaka (27544)]

Truck drivers regularly miss me by a fraction of a centimeter on public roads.

Very funny, but actually an extension of the same thing. The old cliche of "becoming one with the machine" as it pertains to driving is very apt. A good driver "knows" exactly what space the car occupies as it does become part of their personal space and they can parallel park instantly or do one of those "handbrake-slide-into-the-parking-space" tricks.

People who lack that perception are the ones endlessly backing into and out of a space when there's still a long way between them and the next car. Be interesting to see if there's been some test to see if these people also have a limited sense of personal space outside the car and are more prone to misjudging distances from their own bodies.

Re:Anecdote

[Wordplay (54438)]

Ah, I see he cites that famous source, "a psychological study."

Here's something slightly more specific, with some references.

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1997-03/858984531.Ns.r.html [madsci.org]

Re:Anecdote

[ozmanjusri (601766)]

Different I/O port but same phenomenon.

It's sounds like a related phenomenon.

In the late '80s I did a lot of gridding with Wild T1A theodolites, which reverse the image both laterally and vertically. We'd spend about 10 hours a day looking through the jigger with brief breaks in between.

For the first day or two, I had to make a conscious mental correction for the reversal and made a lot of transformation mistakes, but on the second day got to the stage where the view through the scope looked upright and moved on its correct axis. The transition between normal and reversed viewing was still hard hard, to the extent that I refused to drive a vehicle after a day's work. In about a week though, transitioning between worlds became effortless.

That was fine until I took a break for two weeks. When I got back, the disorientation happened again and the adaptation cycle restarted. Makes me wonder how stressful it is to the brain to rewire like that. There must be a reason it reverts if the ability isn't used.

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[Bastard of Subhumani (827601)]

Takes "feels like someone else is doing it" to a whole new level. Well, not quite like someone else doing it. So I'm told.

I learned to scuba dive with quadriplegics

[MichaelCrawford (610140)]

... and paraplegics. To qualify for the class, the disabled students had to have just enough arm control to plug their nose, which is needed to "clear" their ears, that is, adjust the pressure inside the ear drum to the water pressure outside.

Two of us fully-abled people would buddy with the disabled divers. We'd pull them around the ocean floor.

I found it quite an eye-opening experience.

One of the students was my quadriplegic friend Foster Anderson [paralinks.net], who was injured in a motorcycle accident as a teenager. I haven't seen him for a while, but he used to commute from Santa Cruz to Silicon Valley in a special van to work as an engineer. He can just control his arms, but not his fingers.

I understand he once appeared on the cover of a surfing magazine, riding a surfboard.

I also read in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience that a study of Italian paraplegics found the unanimous opinion that becoming disabled was the best thing that ever happened to them: before their injuries, they failed to fully appreciate their lives. Afterwards they were able to live far more rich and rewarding lives, because they understood better just how precious the gift of life is.

Don't write off the disabled. They - we, rather, as I myself have a profoundly serious mental illness [geometricvisions.com] - are capable of far more than most of society gives us credit for.

Think of that next time you park illegally in a handicapped spot. (Foster saw someone do that at a restaurant once, and started repeatedly ramming the car with his electric wheelchair!)

Misleading title: not actually done yet

[Sockatume (732728)]

The research indicates that such a thing is more likely than we had assumed, but nobody's actually done this yet, not even on lab animals.

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[rucs_hack (784150)]

I knew a phd student five years ago who was working on a cybernetic spine augmentation thingy which could route past damage. It was quite promising. While I knew him he was waiting for WHO approval for trials.

Then some large corporation offered him $$$ aplenty for the technology, and offered him a very nice post too. I've not heard a thing about his technology since.

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[cnettel (836611)]

Huh? What do you suppose the mouse experiments did show? They induced a partial injury and could show that rerouting did happen within the short-fiber tissue. We are already able to grow neural tissue, it's far more problematic to imagine recreating all the long nerves.

Misleading comment, did not read article properly

[Sockatume (732728)]

Ack, dammit, that's what I get for speed-reading.

For many, this could be a dream come true

[blind biker (1066130)]

Even though I am not di-or-paraplegic, I had a rash when I read the title and the summary. I didn't even know such studies were underway!

I always found a bit distressing those gadgets for electrically inducing movements of limbs. The calbes hanging out and connecting the limbs with the processor, I dunno, just terrible. But for one who has his/her legs paralyzed, I guess even that is acceptable.

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[Ihlosi (895663)]

Even though I am not di-or-paraplegic, I had a rash when I read the title and the summary. I didn't even know such studies were underway!

Why ... such studies have been underway for quite a while. In fact, "repairing" spinal cord damage is one of the holy grails of science, that's unfortunately always at least two decades away. It's a bit like controlled, energy-positive nuclear fusion.

Even though the issue is of personal importance to me, I won't be holding my breath until a good solution comes out.

Oh, I get it!

[martin-boundary (547041)]

Brain interprets severed spine as censorship and routes around it :)

Learning to walk again

[JeepFanatic (993244)]

My girlfriend once was a professional skiier. She had an accident that left her in a wheelchair for two years. She has some form of paralasis where she cannot feel anything in her legs other than vibrations which travel up her bones. She learned how to walk by feeling the vibration of the floor under her feet. I don't quite understand all of it but it's really amazing. The only time she has problems with this though is on surfaces that absorb the vibration. Then she looks like she's drunk.

Get to the human testing already!

[Bones3D_mac (324952)]

God, this crap is irritating to read about... especially when half your body doesn't work because of problems like this. Here I am watching the last of my youth drain away with ideas I'll never see come to fruition, while they frustratingly dangle this damned carrot in my face.

Sure, I know there's risks involved in rushing into human testing in medicine, before a complete study on other animals has been completed. But, you know... some things are worth taking the extra risk for!

So how about offering up guinea pig slots for those of us with not much else left to lose?

Yet Another Misleading Headline

[divisionbyzero (300681)]

The scientist didn't restore walking after spinal cord injury. The mice restored their own ability to walk by neural rerouting. The scientist just cut the nerves and waited to see what happened. If the scientists actually restored the ability to walk when it was otherwise unlikely to return on its own, then this would be a much bigger story. This story is just another interesting data point that the brain and nervous system are much more plastic than previously thought but we've known that for at least a decade.

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[El Yanqui (1111145)]

Killing us with hope? Great advances in medicine don't occur overnight. They are often long slogs taking decades infrequently punctuated by a breakthrough that may or may not lead to cures. HIV used to be regarded as a death sentence and just over twenty years ago many feared a pandemic. It is now, and has been for a few years, regarded by HIV clinicians as a long-term treatable disease. It still isn't cured and a cure is probably still quite far off, but people afflicted with it have hope for a normal life