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Greyswandir t1_jd8hqjv wrote

First off, there are lots of causes that could lead to someone not being able to walk, and severed nerves or damaged neural pathways are only one of them.

Nerves cannot be naturally regrown by the body, and are delicate and difficult to work with. So far it hasn’t really been possible to do the kind of reconnection you’re thinking of. But there are groups working on that! For example there are projects that implant sensors “upstream” of the break to measure signals and then stimulating electrodes “downstream” of the break to match those measures signals. They’ve started having some pretty remarkable success too.

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CrateDane t1_jd9k5ly wrote

> > > > > Nerves cannot be naturally regrown by the body,

Not entirely true, but in the CNS the regeneration capacity is extremely limited. Peripheral neurons can regenerate to a reasonable degree, typically guided along the existing path of supporting Schwann cells.

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dfgdfgadf4444 t1_jdccqio wrote

Would you be able to cite these projects please?

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Greyswandir t1_jdcuj78 wrote

Of course! This is something I’m mostly familiar with from the popular press, so I’ll leave it to someone else to dig up the more technical papers but:

Here’s an article in Science about recent projects and results.

Here’s a more technical article from Nature Medicine from the research team that pioneered this technique

Here’s a human interest story from a hospital network that performed one of these operations which gives a look at what this is like for a patient.

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