Paralyzed patients regain movement after spinal implant: study

The success, albeit in a small number of patients, offers hope that a fundamentally new treatment can help many of the 6 million paralyzed Americans, including the 1.3 million with spinal cord injuries. The results also cast doubt on a key assumption about spinal cord injury: that treatment requires damaged neurons to regrow or be replaced with, for instance, stem cells. "The big message here is that people with spinal cord injury of the type these men had no longer need to think they have a lifelong sentence of paralysis," Dr Roderic Pettigrew, director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, part of the National Institutes of Health, said in an interview. "They can achieve some level of voluntary function," which he called "a milestone" in spinal cord injury research.