Honest question...what specifically about Cerebral palsy would cause death at an early age (27 is early to die in modern times, IMHO)?
He has been healthy recently, but there have been many close calls. He has frequent seizures and many normally routine things can be life threatening. Others have mentioned things like pneumonia.
He requires 24/7 medical attention, including a nurse who stays with him every night in case, among other things, his seizures get out of control. Thankfully for him, my mom is a nurse and we are fortunate that health insurance covers a very large amount of his medically necessary care.
I'm also sorry because I should have been more succinct. You are correct.
I, too, have a form of muscular dystrophy called Spinal Muscular Atrophy, type II. I deal with a lot of what's being discussed here, i.e. aspiration pneumonia.
That said, there is, at least in my mind, almost no functional difference between not having a muscle and having muscle so deteriorated that it no longer works. Electrical stimuli such as through a TENS unit does nothing.
Back to OPs suggestion though. You might be able to make a case for early onset muscle assist? Dunno, just spit-ballin'.
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A healthy heart contracts exactly the same way (nearly) every time. There is a single electrical tree that coordinates the entire heart, so if you shock the tree at the right point, it will propagate down the entire tree in a predictable pattern and you get normal heart contraction "for free"
The throat is orders of magnitude more complicated. There are several major muscles involved in swallowing, each of which can have tens to hundreds of thousands of individual fibers, each with their own innervation. Coordinating all these fibers to produce a single coherent motion is complex and is not fire and forget - it involves some pretty intricate feedback loops between processing centers in the brain and stretch receptors in the muscle, with the brain refining and redirecting movements based on updated data from the stretch receptors.
It's like the sending a single strong electrical pulse to your lightbulb versus a CPU. It will probably do what you expect for the lightbulb (heart), but not for the CPU (throat).
Technology is way further along than that though, e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60258620
Another thing to note here. In the 2014 article, they mention that they only tried this treatment in patients who had an intact sensory pathway and an injured motor pathway. Kind of speaks to what I was mentioning earlier - the brain can't coordinate movement unless it gets feedback from the muscle. I would presume that this stimulator therapy can't help with the sensory component, which is why the researchers limited the study to patients with sensation.
> Neurostimulation platform. Biomimetic EES requires the delivery of concurrent stimulation waveforms that are turned on and off with a precise timing4,8,12,21. Moreover, many activities necessitate adjustment of stimulation parameters in closed-loop via wireless links. To support these features, we upgraded the Activa RC implantable pulse generator (IPG) with wireless communication modules (Supplementary Fig. 1). This neurostimulation platform supported real-time updates of EES frequency, amplitude and timing from up to 10 stimulation waveforms8. The new paddle lead was interfaced with the Activa RC, which was implanted in the abdomen. We also developed a new software operating through touchscreen interfaces to enable the rapid configuration of activity-dependent stimulation programs (Fig. 4c). To simplify these configurations, wireless recordings of kinematics and muscle activity are displayed in real time, concomitantly to EES waveforms (Supplementary Fig. 1 and Supplementary Video 2).
Regarding Cerbral Palsy, it is... Cerebral, meaning that the peripheral part of the sensory and motor pathways should be intact. So what you would need to do is develop a controller interfacing with them both. That may not be trivial, but I do think it could be done by aplication of known tech and principles.
[1] https://www.uhhospitals.org/services/Ear-Nose-and-Throat-Ser...