Paralyzed patients walk
High-tech implant, new therapy helps mobility
Kelly Thomas woke up in a Florida hospital four years ago with no recollection of the car accident that had robbed her of the ability to walk. Thomas, an active college student who had barrel-raced in rodeos, moved to Kentucky for a year to try out a research study that she hoped would retrain her spinal cord on how to walk.
In February, a trainer who had been scooting along the floor at Thomas’s feet, helping her move her legs and place her feet as she used a walker, stopped and stood up.
“What are you doing?” Thomas asked, alarmed.
“You’re doing it,” the trainer, Rebekah Morton, told her. “You don’t need me.”
Thomas hesitated, and then took a step on her own. Then another. She froze.
“I’m like, ‘That just happened.’ I’ve been working so hard for four years. I got emotional,” Thomas recalled.
Thomas, now 23, is one of several people with spinal cord injuries who are standing, taking steps and – in her case – walking without assistance, thanks to an experimental combination therapy. In a research study at the University of Louisville, Thomas and three others had a device surgically implanted on their spinal cords to stimulate electrical activity, accompanied by months of daily physical therapy. In the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from the University of Louisville reported that two of the subjects could stand and take limited steps at the end of the study, and two were able to walk independently – Thomas and another patient, Jeff Marquis.
A simultaneous case report published in Nature Medicine reported that a single patient with a complete spinal cord injury at the Mayo Clinic was also able to take steps and walk with trainer assistance with electrical stimulation and intensive physical therapy.
“The history of spinal cord injury research is we have 50 years or more of essentially failed trials, with no positive findings,” said David Darrow, a neurosurgery resident at the University of Minnesota Medical School who was not involved in either study but has also been implanting a stimulator device in people with spinal cord injuries. “This is sort of a new era.”
Darrow said there are caveats to the newest studies, and a slew of unanswered scientific and medical questions. This is still a tiny number of patients, with variable injuries, so it is impossible to know how well the intervention will work in the broader population of people with spinal cord injuries. There are also plenty of questions about how the technique works, which will be untangled only as a broader community of researchers begins to study the approach in more patients.
But the results are a powerful proof of concept, built on a surprising case report by the Louisville research team in 2011. Researchers took a medical device developed to manage chronic pain and implanted it to stimulate the spinal cord of a paralyzed patient. After rehabilitation sessions, that patient learned to stand and regained some voluntary control of his leg movements.
Susan Harkema, associate scientific director of the Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center at the University of Louisville who pioneered the technique in people, said that the devices are implanted well below the site of the injury. This isn’t a case of patients regrowing some severed connection in the spine. Instead, Harkema sees these studies as heralding a gradual shift in how experts think of the spinal cord – as able to learn new ways to walk, with the right combination of training and electrical stimulation.
“The basis of this work is that the spinal circuitry is sophisticated and really has the same properties that the brain does in many ways, and in the context of this study, really what is shown is it has the capability of relearning to walk essentially in the right conditions,” Harkema said.
The intervention is not like flipping a switch. First, study subjects were given about two months of intense physical therapy and training, to make sure that alone wouldn’t restore function. After they had the device implanted, they began a rigorous course of daily therapy, as a team of therapists began to train their bodies and minds on how to step again. Thomas said that it was far from intuitive at first, as she would get cues like “toe up,” or “shift your weight,” or “pull your knee up.”
She began stepping with her right leg, on a treadmill, on her third session after the implant. Getting the left leg took longer.
“It was extremely, extremely hard at first,” Thomas said. “I couldn’t talk to anybody, couldn’t look at anybody – I was completely focused on my body. Now, I can walk and talk, and it’s not as much of a struggle. It’s still not easy, and it’s not completely natural.”
Thomas has been able to integrate her new abilities into her daily life after returning home to Florida.