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(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Many physical therapy programs for neurological injury aid in the restoration of one particular function at a time. Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center have begun the development of a new tailored physical therapy program designed to restore a variety of everyday functions instead of just one.
Researchers trained rats with spinal cord injuries on a robotic device to specifically guide their hind limbs according to a pattern recorded before the injury.
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After the rats trained for four weeks, the trained rats had shorter stride lengths than the untrained rats. The results showed a precise and repeatable physiologically relevant training pattern can modify overground locomotion," Nathan D. Neckel, Ph.D., a post-doctoral fellow in the department of neuroscience at Georgetown University, was quoted as saying.
These findings suggest that more accurate and precise exercises in the human physical therapy clinic may lead to the restoration of function in everyday tasks, Dr. Neckel said.
Clinical physical therapy is a widely used treatment for patients who have suffered neurological injuries including stroke, traumatic brain injury or spinal cord injury.
SOURCE: Presented at the 39th Annual Meeting of the Society of Neuroscience, 2009
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