Grant: Project Grant

The sympathetic nervous system regulates a number of critical physiological functions. Spinal cord damage leads to severe sympathetic dysfunctions, including a loss of blood pressure control. The loss of blood pressure control underlies the #1 cause of death in people with spinal cord injury, which is cardiovascular disease. The clinical options for managing these life-threatening swings in blood pressure are limited. While drugs can be used to increase or decrease blood pressure, the slow and long-lasting effects obviate effective management of the rapid changes in blood pressure occurring after spinal cord injury. Over the past decade, electrical stimulation of the spinal cord has shown remarkable promise for improving voluntary movement after injury by restoring nervous system connections. We will use novel electronic device, that when implanted onto the spinal cord, can specifically target neural circuits responsible for cardiovascular and blood pressure control. Here, we propose to harness this intervention to neurorehabilitate sympathetic control of blood pressure after spinal cord injury. Moreover, we will deploy a judicious combination of cutting-edge scientific methods to identify the mechanisms underlying the immediate and long-term effects of this intervention, with an emphasis on the health of the cardiovascular system and the rehabilitation of normal circuits with in the sympathetic nervous system. Our ultimate objective is to establish a novel non-pharmacological therapy to rehabilitate sympathetic function after spinal cord injury that will prevent blood pressure instability, improve heart and blood vessel health, and thus enhance and extend the lives of people living with this condition.