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(Credit: Eric Young)
Although patients with spinal cord injuries at the C6 and C7 vertebra have no hand function, they do have shoulder, elbow and some wrist function because the associated nerves attach to the spinal cord above the injury and connect to the brain. Since the surgeon must tap into these working nerves, the technique will not benefit patients who have lost all arm function due to higher injuries — in vertebrae C1 through C5.
The surgery was developed and performed by the study’s senior author Susan E. Mackinnon, MD, chief of the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine. Specializing in injuries to peripheral nerves, she has pioneered similar surgeries to return function to injured arms and legs.
Mackinnon originally developed this procedure for patients with arm injuries specifically damaging the nerves that provide the ability to flex the thumb and index finger. This is the first time she has applied this peripheral nerve technique to return limb function after a spinal cord injury.
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“Many times these patients say they would like to be able to do very simple things,” Fox says. “They say they would like to be able to feed themselves or write without assistance. If we can restore the ability to pinch, between thumb and index finger, it can return some very basic independence.”
Mackinnon cautions that the hand function restored to the patient was not instantaneous and required intensive physical therapy. It takes time to retrain the brain to understand that nerves that used to bend the elbow now provide pinch, she says.
Though this study reports only one case, Mackinnon and her colleagues do not anticipate a limited window of time during which a patient with a similar spinal cord injury must be treated with this nerve transfer technique. This patient underwent the surgery almost two years after his injury. As long as the nerve remains connected to the support and nourishment of the spinal cord, even though it no longer “talks” to the brain, the nerve and its associated muscle remain healthy, even years after the injury.
“The spinal cord is the control center for the nerves, which run like spaghetti all the way out to the tips of the fingers and the tips of the toes,” says Mackinnon, the Sydney M. Shoenberg Jr. and Robert H. Shoenberg Professor and director of the School of Medicine’s Center for Nerve Injury and Paralysis. “Even nerves below the injury remain healthy because they are still connected to the spinal cord. The problem is that these nerves no longer ‘talk’ to the brain because the spinal cord injury blocks the signals.”
To detour around the block in this patient’s C7 spinal cord injury and return hand function below the level of the injury, Mackinnon operated in the upper arms. There, the working nerves that connect above the injury and the non-working nerves that connect below the injury run parallel to each other, making it possible to tap into a functional nerve and direct those signals to a non-functional neighbor.
In this case, Mackinnon took a non-working nerve that controls the ability to pinch and plugged it into a working nerve that drives one of two muscles that flex the elbow. After the surgery, the bicep still flexes the elbow, but a second muscle, called the brachialis, that used to also provide elbow flexion, now bends the thumb and index finger.
“This is not a particularly expensive or overly complex surgery,” Mackinnon says. “It’s not a hand or a face transplant, for example. It’s something we would like other surgeons around the country to do.”
Detailed information for potential patients interested in nerve transfer surgery for C6 and C7 spinal cord injury will be available after 10 a.m. EDT Tuesday, May 15, 2012 at nerve.wustl.edu.
Mackinnon SE, Yee A, Ray WZ. Spinal cord injury bypass technique with nerve transfers for the restoration of hand function after spinal cord injury – case report and review of the literature. The Journal of Neurosurgery. Online May 15, 2012.
Washington University School of Medicine’s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.