Hi my name is Sacha Keenan and this has been my first week both as a pintern and at the Frazier Institute for spinal cord rehabilitation. This week I began my work with my mentor Enrico who is a post doc working with spinal cord injury patients to increase the amount of activity in their paralyzed limbs, (due to the injury),. While the patients go through physical therapy each one is attached to a robot with pulls their legs in different directions one at a time. With each pull electrodes track the muscle movement and synaptic connections between the spinal cord and leg muscles. Next week I’ll be starting my own project in which I analyze the data from the experiment to see if participants who used a support bar had less activation than the participants who used didn’t. When patients use a bar their body relies more on their shoulders and their legs have less work to do so we see less activation and less progress. Each activation is rated on a scale of 1-6, six being the closet set to a normal muscle contraction and contractions like that are typically labeled both as unrelated to the pulling by the robot/perturbations and not as common. If the muscles are activated in means there’s activity which means there’s hope for future movement in the paralyzed limbs.
Diagram of motor neurons
Different types of perturbation responses
In my experiment my participants won’t be sitting and start out standing, however the muscle responses are taken under the same six classifications.
My host family also did some cooking and baking with me this week. On Thursday we made crème brûlée strawberry whipped crème stuffed french toast and on Sunday we made brownies with one of the children’s friends Elenor and spent some time and the local pool called lakeside which to me seems like the perfect set for a TV show called lakeside based on this town, where everybody seems to know everybody by name!
Lakeside, the local pool in Lakeside Kentucky
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