Articles

FES for breathing support - Using abdominal muscle stimulation to assist ventilator weaning in acute tetraplegia has been the subject of research conducted at the University of Glasgow and the Queen Elizabeth National Spinal Injuries Unit in Glasgow, Scotland. This research was reported recently at the UK IFESS meeting and the UK’s Spinal Cord Injury Research Meeting. Our first client is now using our RehaStim with custom software successfully at home.

Read more: Abdominal stimulation and acute tetraplegia

A study from the 2008 American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA) meeting reported that, on the basis of the prevalence of 250,000 individuals with spinal cord injury alive in the United States today, the aggregate cost for managing patients who have a spinal cord injury is $22.16 billion per year.

Read more: What’s New in Spinal Cord Injury

Recent research indicates that people with spinal cord injuries have an increased cardiovascular risk.  It has been suggested that heart disease is the primary cause of death in people with spinal cord injury.  People with a spinal cord injury are more at risk of coronary heart disease for three reasons:

Read more: Reducing Cardiovascular Risk After Spinal Cord Injury

A new study published in Clinical Rehabilitation had the objective to compare cycling interventions to reduce spastic muscle tone increase in patients with spinal cord injury.

The work by Krause et al was conducted in a Neuroprosthetic outpatient clinic in a university hospital.

Five patients with spinal cord injury took part in a crossover study in which the lower limbs (1) were stimulated by functional neuromuscular electrical stimulation (FES) to induce leg cycling movements and (2) were passively moved by an ergometer machine.

Read more: Study suggests FES helps spasticity in Spinal Cord Injury