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Wednesday, December 11, 2002He started a concentrated program of exercise and electrical muscle stimulation in 1999 and doctors announced this year that he has enjoyed a slow rebirth of limited sensation and movement. At the time, some doctors called it "an unprecedented amount of recovery" for a patient with such an injury. Corbetta said the new studies show Reeve may be exceptional in another way -- his brain has remained receptive to signals from the paralyzed portion of the body even though most of those signals were interrupted by the injury. Some researchers, based on the animal studies, have suggested that repairing the spinal cord would do little good because the brain has effectively given up on the paralyzed portions of the body and has changed so it could no longer process those signals. "The usual argument is that the brain has reorganized so what good is it going to do (to repair the spinal cord)," said Corbetta. "At least in this case, some of the responses are more normal than we would have expected. So there is new hope." posted by Sydney on 12/11/2002 07:42:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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