Dr. Carmel and the Movement Recovery Laboratory Publishes in the Journal of Physiology

The WFCPC would like to congratulate Dr. Jason Carmel and the Movement Recovery Laboratory on the acceptance of their paper “Timing dependent synergies between motor cortex and posterior spinal stimulation in humans”. The Journal of Physiology is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that has published landmark papers in human and mammalian physiology since 1878.

The Movement Recovery Laboratory has previously shown that in animal models, the repetitive combination of brain and spinal cord stimulation can improve forepaw function after injury. Now, in collaboration with spine surgeons at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and Weill Cornell Medicine, they have combined brain and spinal cord stimulation in people undergoing clinically indicated spine surgery. During the operation, patients who consented had electrical stimulation of the scalp to activate the brain and electrodes over the spinal cord to activate muscles. Arm and hand muscle responses to paired brain and cervical spinal cord stimulation were more than five times larger than brain stimulation alone. In addition, the muscle responses were more selective with paired stimulation, suggesting that it can be targeted to weak muscles. The effects of paired stimulation were as strong in damaged areas of the spinal cord as healthy regions. Since a similar electrical stimulation method was effective in rats with injury, this suggests that the approach could be useful for restoring dexterity in people, which is the next step in the research program. This paper advances our understanding of how electrical stimulation can be applied to make the responses both strong and selective. This work is sponsored by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

James R. McIntosh, PhD and Jason B. Carmel, MD, PhD are first and last authors of the paper.