Surgeons in Australia have managed to restore arm function in paralysed patients, allowing them to feed themselves, use tools and handle electronic devices
, according to the results of a groundbreaking study released Friday.
Each nerve transfer took around two hours of painstaking reconstruction, and the team conducted 59 overall. This involves re-routing muscles that still work but are designed for another function to another site to do the work of paralysed muscles."Nerve transfers have been around for a long time but they weren't really being used for spinal chord injury before," Natasha van Zyl, a surgeon at Austin Health in Melbourne said.
"The number one priority of spinal chord injury patients, above walking, above sexual function, is hand function," said van Zyl, lead author of the study published in The Lancet.
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