Man’s paralyzed hand moves again 18 months after surgery

ottawacitizen.com

70 points·speg··8 comments

One thing I don't entirely understand, from the article, is what happened to the system that nerve pathway was initially intended to control.

They "hot-wired" a nerve for bending his elbow - does that mean he has a reduced ability to bend his arm at the elbow, or is it just effectively adding another route from that communication path?

(The reason I'm suspicious of the tradeoffs, I suppose, is that I would have expected something like this to have been tried long ago if it had no negative side effects.)

The article also didn't mention how exactly the nerve going from his elbow was made to connect to his hand. It just says that because nerves grow 1mm/day it takes a long time, but how do you make it do that?

And concerning your other point, his situation does look a bit special - feeling and control in some part of the arm but not the other, so there actually is something to reroute. I don't know how common that is, but it doesn't sound too common.

"In theory", there's nothing special about the motor nerves in your limbs, so you could induct on something like this to transition being able to control some muscle in your core to a limb, and so on.

I'm wondering if this isn't a less drastic version of the way patients with limb transplants regain some degree of control over the limb when their own nerves grow into the foreign limb.

FWIW, my neurosurgeon wife says this is already a relatively routine procedure in the US.

Holy cow that's exciting to think about!

Public health system for the win.

Are you sure about that? "the Canadian-born surgeon who pioneered the technique in St. Louis, Mo."

That dog closing the door for him with the tug rope!

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