Word: locomotor
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...riding accident, made headlines five years ago when he announced that he had regained some sensation and motion throughout his body, thanks to a regimen that included being suspended by harness over a treadmill while therapists moved his legs through a walking gait. The therapy, known as locomotor training, was said to take advantage of the fact that the spinal cord is hardwired with a sort of backup program for walking, one that can take over when signals from the brain quit...
...there were doubters. Reeve was just one person--and a wealthy one too, who could afford the best care. In the 2 1/2 years since his death, however, locomotor training has gone mainstream, with at least 17 hospitals and rehab centers in the U.S. and a handful in Canada and Europe offering it. So far, the patients who have undergone the therapy number only in the hundreds, but about a third of them have been 21 or younger, a fact that is not only helping doctors spare the very patients in whom loss of mobility hits the hardest but also...
...Locomotor training was a long time in coming. In the 1970s, investigators at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm first discovered that paralyzed kittens could be trained to step by placing their back feet on a surface and manually walking them. In 1997, physiologist Reggie Edgerton, who had conducted the kitten studies and had since moved to UCLA, got Reeve onto a treadmill and put him through some therapeutic paces. Two years later, Reeve's foundation launched its NeuroRecovery Network, sponsoring locomotor work at seven hospitals and therapy centers across the country, including the Frazier Rehab Institute in Louisville, Ky., where...
...Locomotor retraining is not a fix but a way to make the most of what a patient has left. It's less helpful when the spine is completely severed--by, say, a gunshot. This prevents the brain from getting any signals downstream. But most injuries are not so complete. As long as some links are present, so is potential. "The spinal-cord networks become optimized for the new situation," Harkema says, "and the brain changes as well." As that happens, entire lives--many that have just begun--change...
Biewener has published a number of notableresearch articles in his field. His articles haveconsidered the effects of locomotor posture on thebiomechanics of support and the energetic costs oflocomotion...