Grasping with a new hand: Improved performance and normalized grasp-selective brain responses despite persistent functional changes in primary motor cortex and low-level sensory and motor impairments.

ABSTRACT: Hand loss can now be reversed through surgical transplantation years or decades after amputation. Remarkably, these patients come to use their new hand to skilfully grasp and manipulate objects. The brain mechanisms that make this possible are unknown. Here we test the hypothesis that the anterior intraparietal cortex (aIPC) - a multimodal region implicated in hand preshaping and error correction during grasping - plays a key role in this compensatory grasp control. Motion capture and fMRI are used to characterize hand kinematics and brain responses during visually guided grasping with a transplanted hand at 26 and 41 months post-transplant in patient DR, a former hand amputee of 13 years. Compared with matched controls, DR shows increasingly normal grasp kinematics paralleled by increasin

SUBMITTER: Valyear KF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5874165 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature