“I have regained my freedom,” summarizes Gert-Jan, to AFP. With a spinal cord injury to his cervical vertebrae after a bicycle accident ten years ago, the 40-year-old Dutchman can now stand and walk.
A feat made possible by the combination of two types of electronic implants, one in the brain and the other in the spinal cord, the results of which were revealed this week by Swiss and French scientists.
Stimulate the spinal cord by thought.
The first type of implant is placed “over the region of the brain responsible for leg movements,” explains Jocelyne Bloch, a neurosurgeon who participated in the study, in a news release from the University of Lausanne. This device “allows us to decode the electrical signals that the brain generates when we think about walking,” she added. Toward the spinal cord, a neurostimulator was placed and connected to a field of electrodes, the researcher said.
The spinal cord, contained by the vertebral column, extends the brain and controls many movements. Therefore, these can be irretrievably lost if the contact with the brain is damaged. Here, the intentions of the movements emitted by the brain are interpreted by algorithms and then transformed into electrical stimulation of the spinal cord. The latter then activates the leg muscles, explains the University of Lausanne in its press release.
Before Gert-Jan, other patients who could no longer move their legs benefited from advances that allowed them to walk again, such as exoskeletons. But for the first time, this man can once again control the movement of his legs and the rhythm of his steps through thought, underlines the study on this experiment, published this Wednesday in the scientific journal. Nature.
generalization will have to wait
It is the fruit of 20 years of research and experimentation, first in rodents, then in primates and finally in humans, neuroscientist Grégoire Courtine told BFMTV on Thursday. But the results revealed this week are not the end of the road. “It will take many more years of research” before it becomes widespread, Guillaume Charvet, a researcher at the CEA (Commissariat for Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies), part of the project, told AFP.
The next step is “miniaturization”: Gert-Jan currently walks with a helmet screwed on his head and a walker equipped with a computer. Professor Courtine compares the evolution he wishes to follow with that of the pacemaker, a pacemaker that has become increasingly compact since its development in the 1960s and is now virtually invisible.
The ultimate goal is that the device invented by the teams led by Grégoire Courtine and Jocelyne Bloch can be applied to the arm movements of quadriplegic patients.
Conditions for the success of the system.
The device imagined by the researchers does not correspond to all paralysis either. “One of the conditions sine qua non it’s that the part of the spinal cord responsible for locomotion is intact,” Jocelyne Bloch warned on BFMTV on Thursday. The spinal cord injury responsible for the paralysis must therefore be quite high.
“It is believed that in the future, the sooner this stimulation is applied, the easier it will be for patients to walk again,” he added.
The case is not easy for the affected patient either: “you have to get involved in a rehabilitation process that is long and intense, it is not magical,” says Grégoire Courtine. The neuroscientist warns that “it takes a lot of effort and a lot of practice to see this result.”
Source: BFM TV
