​Paralyzed patients can walk again with the new therapy, says study | – Times of India

54-year-old Wolfgang Jäger, from Kappel, Austria has been in a wheelchair since 2006. He was paralyzed due to a spinal cord injury caused during a ski accident. Jäger experienced his mobility and independence restored, as he participated in a clinical trial lately. In deep brain stimulation (DBS) therapy, the brain’s hypothalamus is stimulated, which restores mobility.
“Last year on vacation, it was no problem to walk a couple of steps down and back to the sea using the stimulation. I can also reach things in my cupboards in the kitchen,” Jäger said in a release.

The researchers at EPFL (Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne) and Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), led by professors Grégoire Courtine and Jocelyne Bloch, have made a groundbreaking study in the treatment of spinal cord injuries (SCI). They found out that by stimulating the hypothalamus paralyzed patients can walk again.
The team improved the lower limb movements in two individuals with partial SCI, by stimulating the lateral hypothalamus (LH) via DBS.
Though DBS has been used to treat movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease, this study has found that stimulating LH can help in motor recovery. The study published in Nature Medicine, revealed that the therapy showed immediate results and also long-term improvement even after the stimulation is taken away.

“This research demonstrates that the brain is needed to recover from paralysis. Surprisingly, the brain is not able to take full advantage of the neuronal projections that survive after a spinal cord injury. Here, we found how to tap into a small region of the brain that was not known to be involved in the production of walking in order to engage these residual connections and augment neurological recovery in people with spinal cord injury,” Courtine, professor of neuroscience at EPFL, Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) and UNIL and co-director of the Neuro Restore center said in a release.

Bloch, a neurosurgeon and professor at the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), UNIL and EPFL, and co-director of theNeuroRestore center, spoke about the therapy results, “Once the electrode was in place and we performed the stimulation, the first patient immediately said, ‘I feel my legs.’ When we increased the stimulation, she said, ‘I feel the urge to walk!’ This real-time feedback confirmed we had targeted the correct region, even if this region had never been associated with the control of the legs in humans. At this moment, I knew that we were witnessing an important discovery for the anatomical organization of brain functions.”