Cortex-dependent recovery of unassisted hindlimb locomotion after complete spinal cord injury in adult rats
- Drexel University, United States
- CINAC, Hospital Universitario HM Puerta del Sur, Universidad CEU-San Pablo, Spain
Abstract
After paralyzing spinal cord injury the adult nervous system has little ability to 'heal' spinal connections, and it is assumed to be unable to develop extra-spinal recovery strategies to bypass the lesion. We challenge this assumption, showing that completely spinalized adult rats can recover unassisted hindlimb weight support and locomotion without explicit spinal transmission of motor commands through the lesion. This is achieved with combinations of pharmacological and physical therapies that maximize cortical reorganization, inducing an expansion of trunk motor cortex and forepaw sensory cortex into the deafferented hindlimb cortex, associated with sprouting of corticospinal axons. Lesioning the reorganized cortex reverses the recovery. Adult rats can thus develop a novel cortical sensorimotor circuit that bypasses the lesion, probably through biomechanical coupling, to partly recover unassisted hindlimb locomotion after complete spinal cord injury.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Science Foundation (CBET 1402984)
- Anitha Manohar
- Guglielmo Foffani
- Patrick D Ganzer
- John R Bethea
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All animal procedures were conducted in accordance with Drexel University Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee-approved protocols (Protocol# 20069 and Protocol#18374)
Copyright
© 2017, Manohar et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Cortex-dependent recovery of unassisted hindlimb locomotion after complete spinal cord injury in adult rats
eLife 6:e23532.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.23532
