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May 15th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda TUESDAY, May 15 (HealthDay News) — 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.”
Fox and her colleagues discuss the case in the May 15 online issue of
the Journal of Neurosurgery.
The authors pointed out that their surgical approach would only be
viable for patients like theirs: namely, those who sustain injury to the
C7 (or C6) vertebra, located in the lower region of the neck. While such
patients lose hand function, they retain function in their shoulder, elbow
and wrist because the spinal region above the injury remains free of
damage.
Those who suffer an injury to the C1 through C5 vertebra experience
total arm function loss, and would not be eligible for this type of nerve
bypass surgery, developed and performed by study senior author Dr. Susan
E. Mackinnon, chief of the university’s division of plastic and
reconstructive surgery.
Mackinnon’s initial goal had been more targeted: to restore thumb and
index finger function to patients suffering from localized nerve damage.
This is the first instance in which the approach was harnessed to overcome
damage stemming from spinal cord injury.
The breakthrough, however, relies heavily on arduous post-surgical
physical therapy, during which the patient’s brain must be taught to
recognize that the rewired nerves control the fingers rather than the
elbow.
The good news: Any similarly injured patient with intact upper arm
nerves would be eligible for this procedure, regardless of how much time
has elapsed since the initial spinal cord damage. The current patient was
operated on two years after his accident.
One expert explained why such surgery might work so long after a spinal
cord injury.
“What this case demonstrated, and what is different from peripheral
nerve-injured patients who undergo nerve grafts and nerve transfers, is
that the motor neuron pool is intact and the muscle is preserved for a
longer time than in peripheral nerve injury,” said Dr. Lewis Lane, chief
of hand surgery at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y. “If
a peripheral nerve is cut, the lower motor neuron cell connection to the
muscle is disrupted. However, in spinal cord injury the injury is, by
definition, in the spinal cord, so the connection … is not disrupted
because peripheral nerves are intact.
“This connection is important for muscle preservation,” Lane added,
“and is the subtle but important distinction that allowed the procedure
done on the patient in this case report to succeed more than 22 months
after the injury.”
The Washington University surgeons also noted that the procedure stood
a good chance of success because of its simplicity.
“This is not a particularly expensive or overly complex surgery,”
Mackinnon said in the news release. “It’s not a hand or a face transplant,
for example. It’s something we would like other surgeons around the
country to do.”
Dr. J. Marc Simard, a professor of neurosurgery, pathology and
physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore,
was excited about the success of the procedure.
“It’s very important to caution that this applies only to those with
spinal injuries far enough down on the spine that there are remnants of
nerves that are still functional above the injury that can be tapped
into,” he noted.
“But, for these types of patients, this sounds perfectly reasonable and
rational,” Simard added, “based on the basic science work that’s been
going on for the last 25 years. And [it’s] really a major step in the
rehabilitation world.”
More information
For more on spinal cord injuries, go to the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
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