More than 40 quadriplegic patients have regained at least partial control of their arms and hands thanks to a revolutionary spinal cord stimulation device. The news comes from a study published in Nature Medicine by an international research team, which tested the technology developed by the Swiss company Onward, and if confirmed it could offer hope of improvement to thousands of people who have suffered paralysis in following spinal injuries.
The device tested in the study is called ARCex, and consists of a small stimulator that is connected to external electrodes in the spinal area. It works by emitting gentle electrical discharges that stimulate the spinal cord, and in conjunction with targeted physical rehabilitation – which some patients have described as akin to “finger pilates” – pushes the brain to make new neural connections to areas unreachable due to the spinal injury that paralyzed patients, thus ensuring the recovery of some control with arms and hands.
It is not a technology capable of restoring the ability to walk or of producing drastic changes in patients' mobility – to achieve this, much more invasive interventions are needed to reconstruct or bypass the damaged spinal cord segment – but it still allows us to obtain tangible improvements that have a significant impact on concrete on quality of life. And since it is an external, non-invasive tool, it has excellent chances of landing in clinical practice extremely quickly.
Furthermore, the study has the high number of patients involved (60, a large audience for this type of research) and the absolutely positive results. At the end of a four-month therapeutic journey, consisting of an initial two months of physiotherapy followed by two months in which physical exercises were accompanied by electrical stimulation, 72% of participants reported an improvement in arm strength and control. and/or hands, even without using ARCex anymore. Furthermore, 90% of participants achieved an improvement in at least one of these two parameters, and 87% declared they had experienced an improvement in their quality of life.
Results in hand, the company producing the device is now in the process of requesting approval for clinical use from the main regulatory agencies. And if everything goes as hoped, many patients from all over the world will soon be able to benefit from this small, new therapeutic revolution.