The patient's age being twenty-one may have made a difference in this happy news story. My dad had a slip and fall on ice at age seventy-two that left him paralyzed from the chin down until he died six years later. He had had a similar injury from a car crash (back when cars didn't have seat belts) at age eighteen, from which he recovered fully (although he wasn't so paralyzed from the first injury). So when he had his second injury, he at first thought he would also recover from that injury. Maybe because the second injury aggravated damage to his spine still remaining from his first injury, or maybe just because he was a lot older when injured the second time, he never recovered much at all from the second injury. His experience reminds me how many other people in a family are affected by spinal cord injuries, and thus how important it is to find better treatments for them.

So it's hard to say how wide a range of patients will be treatable with the new technique, but that's what medical research is for: to find out what helps for which patients. I hope further research continues on this and other treatments for spinal cord injuries.