After paralyzing spinal cord injury the adult nervous system has little ability to ‘heal’ spinal connections, and it is assumed to be unable to develop extra-spinal recovery strategies to bypass the lesion. We challenge this assumption, showing that completely spinalized adult rats can recover unassisted hindlimb weight support and locomotion without explicit spinal transmission of motor commands through the lesion. This is achieved with combinations of pharmacological and physical therapies that maximize cortical reorganization, inducing an expansion of trunk motor cortex and forepaw sensory cortex into the deafferented hindlimb cortex, associated with sprouting of corticospinal axons. Lesioning the reorganized cortex reverses the recovery. Adult rat scan thus develop a novel cortical sensorimotor circuit that bypasses the lesion, probably through biomechanical coupling, to partly recover unassisted hindlimb locomotion after complete spinal cord injury.

My takeaways:

1. This early basic research demonstrates a method for paralyzed individuals to recover function in their limbs following spinal cord injury.

eLife science, vol 6, e23532

Karen Moxon in the School of Biomedical Engineering at Drexel University and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UC Davis

Her work was funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, and Shriners Hospital for Children