Doctors Restore Some Hand Function to Quadriplegic Patient
For the first time, surgeons have restored partial mobility to the hand of a quadriplegic patient.
The patient had suffered an injury to the lowest bone in his neck, and it was the specific location of the injury that allowed surgeons to avoid operating on the spine itself.
Instead, the team focused on the patient’s still healthy upper arm nerves. Bypassing the hand’s original (and now damaged) connection to the injured spine, the team effectively used the upper arm nerves to rewire a fresh connection to the intact motor control region of his brain.
A year of rigorous physical therapy later, the team of surgeons at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis reaped their reward: the restoration of the patient’s ability to flex his thumb and index finger.
“This procedure is unusual for treating quadriplegia because we do not attempt to go back into the spinal cord where the injury is,” surgeon Dr. Ida K. Fox, an assistant professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery, said in a news release from the university. “Instead, we go out to where we know things work — in this case the elbow — so that we can borrow nerves there and reroute them to give hand function.”