A 62-year-old Frenchman who had difficulty walking a few steps without losing his balance due to Parkinson’s disease has regained the ability of his legs thanks to an implant that stimulates the spinal cord.
“I could barely walk without falling several times a day. “In certain situations, for example when entering an elevator, I stood on the spot, I froze, as they say,” Frenchman Marc Gauthier from Bordeaux said in a press release on Monday, according to the media “Science et Future”.
The 60-year-old, who was diagnosed when he was just 36 and suffered from an advanced form of the disease, exhibited severe walking and balance problems that led him to five to six falls per day, according to this report in “Natural Medicine” on Monday.
However, a team of researchers from France and Switzerland has developed a spinal cord stimulation tool that would make it possible to correct these disorders in patients particularly affected by Parkinson’s, by restoring the nerve signals sent by the brain and damaged by the disease.
VIDEO: Spinal implant enables Parkinson’s patient to walk again.
A man severely disabled by Parkinson’s disease can walk almost normally again thanks to electrodes implanted in his spinal cord. The medical premiere was achieved by Swiss researchers who had previously… pic.twitter.com/n8w2Hl4oMQ
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) November 7, 2023
Specifically, the tool consists of an array of electrodes implanted near the spinal cord and connected to an electrical pulse generator under the abdominal skin, according to French media.
The team had previously used a similar version of the implant to enable paralyzed patients – as a result of spinal cord injuries – to walk again.
“It is impressive to note that by targeted electrical stimulation of the spinal cord, as we did in paraplegic patients, we can correct the gait disorders caused by Parkinson’s disease,” said Jocelyne Bloch, a neurosurgeon from Vaud at the University Hospital Center (CHUV) and at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, according to Science et Avenir.
After just two months of training, during which he used the implant for 8 hours a day, the sixty-year-old would have described a “rebirth”, while he can now run practically normally, 6 kilometers at a time, according to “The Guardian”.
“Not at any moment [le patient] is not controlled by the machine, Professor Eduardo Martin Moraud from the University Hospital of Lausanne clarified, according to the British media. It just improves his ability to walk.”
A clinical trial on six patients planned for 2024 will attempt to confirm the results achieved with the sixty-year-old.