A new treatment could restore some mobility in people paralyzed by strokes

Sitting in an exam room, surrounded by doctors and scientists, Heather Rendulic opened her left hand for the first time since suffering a series of strokes nine years earlier when she was in her early 20s.

“It was an amazing feeling for me to be able to do that again,” Rendulic says. “It’s not something I ever thought was possible.”

But immediately after a surgically implanted device sent electrical pulses into her spinal cord, Rendulic could not only open her hand but also showed other marked improvements in arm mobility, researchers report February 20 in Nature Medicine. “We all started crying,” Marco Capogrosso, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh, said in a February 15 news conference. “We didn’t really expect this could work as fast as that.”