Implant helps paralysed man walk again

PARIS: Five years after he was paralysed in a snowmobile accident, a man in the US has learned to walk again aided by an electrical implant, in a potential breakthrough for spinal injury sufferers.

A team of doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota say the man, using a front-wheeled walker, was able to cover the equivalent of the length of a football pitch, issuing commands from his brain to transfer weight and maintain balance -- all previously thought impossible for paralysed patients.

The man, now 29, severed his spinal cord in the middle of his back when he crashed his snowmobile in 2013. He is completely paralysed from the waist down, and cannot move or feel anything below the middle of his torso.

In the study, the results of which were published on Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, doctors in 2016 implanted a small electronic device in the man’s spine. The wirelessly operated implant, about the size of a AA battery, generates electrical pulses to stimulate nerves that -- due to the injury -- had been permanently disconnected from the brain.

"What this is teaching us is that those networks of neurons below a spinal cord injury can still function after paralysis," said Kendall Lee, neurosurgeon at the Mayo Clinic and lead study author.

Within weeks of the device being switched on, the man began to take his first steps since the accident -- but was still suspended in a harness. Astonishingly, after several more sessions of rehab and physiotherapy, he was able to support most of his own body weight and take steps on a treadmill.

"We didn’t limit our expectations and continued to safely advance his performance as he gained function," Kristin Zhao, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Assistive and Restorative Technology Laboratory said.