The Lancet article carries a series of short medical videos showing the impact on Summers of epidural stimulation
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Researchers at the University of California have helped a 25-year-old former university baseball player who has been paralyzed since 2006 from a car accident to regain the ability to stand, use a treadmill and move several joints voluntarily.
The experimental treatment developed at UCLA and the University of Louisville has been used with Rob Summers for two years.
The treatment uses electrical stimulation to the spinal cord, a process more generally used to treat chronic pain. It is described in the UK medical journal Lancet, published 20 May.
Two Zurich researchers, Grégoire Courtine and Rubia van den Brand, in editorial published with the research, caution that “activity-based rehabilitation” continues to provide the most help for some recovery for patients with spinal cord injuries, but that the time has come for spinal cord-injured (SCI) patients to move: “Although some of these treatments might be translatable to patients with moderate SCI, and are entering phase 1 or 2 clinical trials, evidence for the efficacy of any intervention designed to repair the injured human spinal cord is still lacking.”
The Los Angeles Times, in a lengthy feature story, quotes a doctor who suggests that the treatment may be able to help 10 to 15 percent of people who are paralyzed.
Summers was injured when he went out to his car to pick up a gym bag and another car jumped the curb and hit him, in a hit-and-run accident. He was 20 years old at the time, in his third year of university studies in Oregon in the US.
The authors, led by Susan Harkema, offer an explanation for the treatment’s success and hope for extending the treatment to other patients: “Task-specific training with epidural stimulation might reactivate previously silent spared neural circuits or promote plasticity. These interventions could be a viable clinical approach for functional recovery after severe paralysis.”
Links to other sites: Los Angeles Times, Science Now
The Nobel Prize for Economics did not make its customary trip to the free market apostles at the University of Chicago. Instead it recognized two things not always understood by economists: women and the public interest in common resources. The Nobel panel chose two American professors: Elinor Ostrom from Indiana University and Oliver Williamson from Berkeley, part of the University of California. Ostrom has specialized in the field of common-pool resources, which can suffer from congestion and over-use. Her work was developed from a study of dams in Nepal and can be applied to many areas of sustainable development such as fishing grounds and bio-diversity. Her work stresses that local communities often manage resources better than government bureaucracies.
Williamson has focused on the importance of transaction costs and developed a critique of the view that corporations are solely driven by the profit motive. Both economists deal with institutions as complex bodies with sometimes conflicting aims. The Nobel panel denied being greatly influenced by the current economic crisis but it might well have decided it was not the right time to again reward the Chicago School of economics.
Links: Nobel Prize in Economics
