‘Imagination’ gets paralysed woman walking

WOMAN who was paralysed for 13 years can walk again after a “brain training” programme restored feeling in her legs. The 32-year-old is one of eight people with spinal cord injuries who have gone from full to partial paralysis.

Therapy sessions that included a virtual reality football game and walking in a robotic exoskeleton are thought to have reawakened surviving nerve fibres.

The Walk Again Project in Sao Paulo, Brazil, showed patients developed feeling in and control of muscles in their previously numb legs. Four of the patients went from full paralysis to partial paralysis within a year.

Scientists say this offers hope to those who have had spinal cord injuries, strokes, or similar conditions that challenge mobility and independence.

The 32-year-old woman, who has not been named, saw the most dramatic change.

She went from being unable to stand to being able to walk using a walker, braces and her therapist’s help. After 13 months she could move her legs voluntarily, while her body was supported in a harness.

Researchers, led by neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University in North Carolina, gave the patients virtual-reality goggles to create the illusion that they had working legs.

Patients then spent at least two hours a week using devices controlled by their brain signals.

They were asked to imagine walking in the virtual world and it appears that, by doing so, the training created a mental image, in the patient’s brains, of walking.

One of the biggest gains was improvement in bladder and bowel control.