Paraplegics may regain mobility and feeling

Patients long paralyzed from spinal cord injuries showed unprecedented gains in mobility and feeling — and in some cases a renewed sex life — through virtual-reality training and the use of brain-controlled robotics, scientists said on Thursday.

Six men and two women who had completely lost the use of their lower limbs all made significant progress, the researchers reported in the journal Scientific Reports.

In four cases, doctors were able to upgrade their status to “partial paralysis”, an unheardof level of improvement using noninvasive techniques.

One of them — a 32-year-old woman paralyzed for more than a decade — may have experienced the most dramatic transformation. At the outset of the trial, undertaken at a clinic in Sao Paulo, Brazil, she was unable to stand.

Within 13 months, she could walk with the help of braces and a therapist, and could produce a walking motion while suspended from a harness.

“We couldn’t have predicted this surprising clinical outcome when we began the project,” said Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke University and the main architect of the rehabilitative research.

The innovative therapy combined several techniques to stimulate parts of the brain that once controlled the patients’ long-inactive limbs.

Nicolelis took the global spotlight in June 2014 when a paraplegic wearing a robotic bodysuit he codesigned delivered the symbolic first kick at soccer’s World Cup in Brazil.

In the new trials, rehabilitation began by learning how to operate a digital doppelganger, or avatar, within a virtual reality environment.

“If you said, ‘Use your hands’, there was brain activity,” Nicolelis said. “But the brain has almost completely erased the representation of their lower limbs.”

After months of training, these long-dormant parts of the brain started to wake up.

At that point, the patients graduated to more challenging equipment that required some control over their posture, balance and ability to use upper limbs, including overhead harnesses — common in physical therapy centers — that carry the body’s weight.

They also used exoskeleton robotics not unlike the articulated, high-tech armor of comic book hero Iron Man.