Corticospinal-motor neuronal plasticity promotes exercise-mediated recovery in humans with spinal cord injury.

ABSTRACT: Rehabilitative exercise in humans with spinal cord injury aims to engage residual neural networks to improve functional recovery. We hypothesized that exercise combined with non-invasive stimulation targeting spinal synapses further promotes functional recovery. Twenty-five individuals with chronic incomplete cervical, thoracic, and lumbar spinal cord injury were randomly assigned to 10 sessions of exercise combined with paired corticospinal-motor neuronal stimulation (PCMS) or sham-PCMS. In an additional experiment, we tested the effect of PCMS without exercise in 13 individuals with spinal cord injury with similar characteristics. During PCMS, 180 pairs of stimuli were timed to have corticospinal volleys evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation over the primary motor cortex arrive at

SUBMITTER: Jo HJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7534104 | biostudies-literature | 2020 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature