Suche
Mein Konto
A few days ago I was amazed to see a video of a man paralyzed from the waist down walking outdoors.
With a frame for support, he was able to move under his own power thanks to an electrical device surgically implanted in his spine.
The patient, a 29-year-old Italian man named Michel Roccati, had been seriously injured in a motorcycle accident in 2017, but work by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne meant he could now run a computer tablet wirelessly connected to the implant to stimulate the nerve cells - neurons - in his spinal cord.
“The first few steps were incredible – a dream come true!” he said. “I have been training quite intensively over the last few months and have set myself a number of goals.
With a frame for support, he was able to move under his own power thanks to an electrical device surgically implanted in his spine
“For example, I can walk up and down stairs now, and I hope to be able to run a mile by spring.”
This “medical miracle” is the culmination of research into implants originally developed over 30 years ago to block pain signals traveling down the spine. In fact, this treatment is offered on the NHS to patients with chronic pain who have tried other approaches.
More recently, researchers around the world began to wonder whether these implants could be modified so that instead of blocking nerve messages, they stimulate them to help patients with broken spinal cords move again.
A few years ago I did a television series where we looked at groundbreaking work on spinal stimulation that was being done at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.
The patient was a 26-year-old Texan named Kent who, like Michel, had broken his back in a motorcycle accident and was completely paralyzed below the chest.
A team led by Dr. Susan Harkema of the Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center had a device implanted in his spine just below the injury. I had assumed that after a spinal cord fracture, the nerves beneath the fracture would gradually die.
So it was overwhelming to see how much of a difference the implant made. By stimulating the remaining nerves, they had made them more excitable and receptive to the faint messages still permeating the brain.
It gave Kent back his bowel and bladder control and also meant he could stand and even move his legs without assistance. Now two Swiss neuroscientists, Grégoire Courtine and Jocelyne Bloch, have taken this research a step further and developed larger implants that use artificial intelligence to provide much more precise control over the neurons that control the leg muscles.
They used their specially designed implants on three patients (one of whom was Michel Roccati), all of whom had very serious spinal injuries, and within a day of activating their implants, all three were able to recover, according to Dr. Courtine “stand and walk, pedal and swim.”
Within months, they were also able to participate in social activities, such as standing up for a drink at a bar.
This is still very early days, but the company Onward Medical, which is commercializing this research, tells me they are now planning larger trials that will hopefully include UK patients later this year.
I will be following future developments with great interest and hope to bring you an update soon.
What is the right amount of sleep for a healthy brain? You might think that more is better, but a study from the University of Oslo in Norway - based on brain scans - suggests that on average you only need 6.8 hours. The researchers found that people with the largest hippocampus (the area of the brain important for memory) were among the shortest sleepers, averaging just 6.2 hours. This is reassuring for people like me who struggle to get the recommended 7-8 hours per night.
No panic! Eating vegetables really IS good for you
“Eating lots of vegetables may NOT help ward off heart disease,” was the surprising claim this week from researchers at the University of Oxford, who found that people who ate lots of cooked vegetables were no better off than those who refused vegetables.
This contradicts previous research results. I looked at the study to find out more. First of all, it was an impressively large study, involving almost 400,000 volunteers from the UK Biobank, a huge research project that has been helping to answer a wide range of important health questions since 2006.
In the new study, researchers analyzed dietary questionnaires that these people filled out at the start of the study and then tracked down what happened to them 12 years later.
In addition to finding that eating lots of cooked vegetables didn't seem to improve heart health, the analysis showed that while people who ate lots of raw vegetables were less likely to die from heart disease, this was largely due to other factors, such as income or lifestyle. So it wasn't the raw vegetables that made the difference, but the fact that they tended to be wealthier and more health conscious.
But how do you explain these findings about cooked vegetables? Tom Sanders, emeritus professor of nutrition and dietetics at King's College London, believes this could be a case of "reverse causality" - whereby "the group that consumed the most vegetables were more likely to receive medication for high cholesterol and high blood pressure." In other words, the "high vegetarian group" included people who already had a higher risk of heart disease and who ate more vegetables in the hopes of preventing a heart attack. If so, it is not surprising that they showed little benefit.
And although the research showed no heart benefits, those who ate the most vegetables had the lowest risk of dying prematurely from any cause — possibly because eating vegetables protects against diseases like cancer.
We know that vegetables contain lots of nutrients and fiber, which are good for our overall health and our gut bacteria.
So I will happily fill my plate with almost any vegetable except Brussels sprouts.
What makes some people more attractive than others? This was the subject of a series I did with John Cleese and Liz Hurley.
Some researchers suggested that it's about having more symmetrical features, which in turn reflects how healthy you are; others thought it had more to do with the strength of each other's immune systems, which we seem to be able to detect subconsciously.
Support for this theory comes from a recent study in the US in which young adults were given blood tests and photos of them were rated for attractiveness. And lo and behold, those who were considered more attractive also had the healthiest immune systems. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, as mating with them would likely produce healthier offspring.
People looking for love may want to update their dating profile to add: “I have a lot of natural killer cells.”