Cervical Spinal Cord Stimulation Immediately Improves Arm Movement Years After Stroke

Summary

A University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon team, co-led by Douglas Weber and Marco Capogrosso, completed a pilot trial implanting epidural stimulation leads in the neck to treat chronic arm weakness after stroke, in seven participants whose strokes ranged from six months to a decade earlier. Unlike stimulation approaches meant to boost the effects of rehabilitation exercises over time, this system worked immediately: turning it on raised average muscle strength by 32% right away, and participants kept some of that benefit even after the stimulator was switched off. Across four weeks, with less than nine hours of total supervised activity, arm function scores rose by an average of 6.6 points on a standard clinical scale, and spasticity eased in every participant. No serious side effects occurred, though the team found stimulating too high on the neck could interfere with breathing and adjusted their protocol accordingly.