Spinal stimulation counters blood pressure instability from spinal cord injury

Spinal cord injury can disrupt the baroreflex, causing haemodynamic instability. Gregoire Courtine and colleagues previously developed a system for delivering precise spatiotemporal spinal stimulation that helped restore walking function in patients paralysed from spinal injury. Here they develop the system to establish a stimulation protocol to restore haemodynamic stability after spinal cord injury. They show that this neuroprosthetic was able to adjust haemodynamics for extended periods of time in rodents and non-human primates, as well as demonstrating proof of principle in a human participant. These findings establish a basis for potential clinical development of this technology.