4 ms·
Man’s paralyzed hand moves again 18 months after surgery
- mgkimsal 10y agoHoly cow that's exciting to think about!
- ape4 10y agoPublic health system for the win.
- refurb 10y agoAre you sure about that? "the Canadian-born surgeon who pioneered the technique in St. Louis, Mo."
- parshimers 10y agoThat dog closing the door for him with the tug rope!
- rincebrain 10y agoOne thing I don't entirely understand, from the article, is what happened to the system that nerve pathway was initially intended to control. They "hot-wired" a nerve for bending his elbow - does that mean he has a reduced ability to bend his arm at the elbow, or is it just effectively adding another route from that communication path? (The reason I'm suspicious of the tradeoffs, I suppose, is that I would have expected something like this to have been tried long ago if it had no negative side effects.)
- kaybe 10y agoThe article also didn't mention how exactly the nerve going from his elbow was made to connect to his hand. It just says that because nerves grow 1mm/day it takes a long time, but how do you make it do that? And concerning your other point, his situation does look a bit special - feeling and control in some part of the arm but not the other, so there actually is something to reroute. I don't know how common that is, but it doesn't sound too common.
- rincebrain 10y ago"In theory", there's nothing special about the motor nerves in your limbs, so you could induct on something like this to transition being able to control some muscle in your core to a limb, and so on. I'm wondering if this isn't a less drastic version of the way patients with limb transplants regain some degree of control over the limb when their own nerves grow into the foreign limb.
- stephencanon 10y agoFWIW, my neurosurgeon wife says this is already a relatively routine procedure in the US.