A man with Parkinson’s disease has regained the ability to walk after physicians implanted a small device into his spinal cord that sends signals to his legs.
“I can now walk with much more confidence and my daily life has profoundly improved,” said the patient, a 62-year-old named Marc, during a press conference.
Marc is the first and only person to have received the new spinal neuroprosthesis, a small device containing electrodes placed under the skin on top of his spinal cord. It works by sending bursts of electrical signals to stimulate the nerves in his spinal cord, which then activate his leg muscles. The implant is described in a new study published [November 6] in Nature Medicine.
For more than 20 years, people with Parkinson’s-related mobility issues have been treated using deep brain stimulation. But many people like Marc find that their symptoms persist, says Jocelyne Bloch, a coauthor of the study and a neuroscientist at the Lausanne University Hospital. So she and her team have been on the hunt for new therapies. They previously worked on one that restored walking in a person who was paralyzed as a result of spinal cord injury.
