Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Spinal cord injury is a catastrophic event that completely changes a person's life and costs the Canadian health care system over $3.6 billion annually. In humans, the majority of spinal cord injuries occur at the cervical level, disrupting descending and ascending pathways between the brain and the spinal centers controlling arm and leg movements. Although these spinal centers remain mostly intact after spinal cord injury, regeneration of neural pathways for meaningful communication between the brain and spinal cord is not possible in humans. Currently, most experimental studies in animal models have focused on the recovery of hindlimb locomotion following a thoracic injury. Furthermore, studies that have investigated locomotor recovery after cervical injury have mainly used behavioural approaches during simple tasks, such as overground locomotion at self-selected speeds on a flat surface and/or treadmill locomotion at a single slow/moderate speed. However, these tasks only capture a small percentage of locomotor behaviours in an animal's repertoire. We do not know the neural structures and pathways involved in the recovery of locomotion after cervical injury and their relative contributions according to task demands. Consequently, the aim of the project is to determine how the nervous system organizes movements after cervical spinal cord injury to perform locomotor behaviours with varying demands. Our hypothesis is that increasing task demand will highlight limitations to locomotor recovery/capabilities after spinal cord injury. Future studies will investigate different neuromodulation approaches based on the new adaptive strategies and patterns of muscle activations, such as epidural electrical stimulation, to facilitate the recovery of locomotion in tasks with varying demands after cervical spinal cord injury.