“But I built up a skill set with the approaches that we use. “Everywhere I went for my training – I went to Massachusetts and Michigan and California and Oregon – and every time I went, someone said, ‘Well, we don’t do MS research.’ So, I studied typical aging. 1 thing that I wanted to study,” said Fling, who discussed his academic journey during an episode of the podcast Health and Human Science Matters. Since then, he’s been able to pivot to MS research at the Sensorimotor Neuroimaging Laboratory. They are not particularly expensive.”įling said preliminary data suggests that imperceptible stimuli via electrodes to the muscle up to the brain and back aids patients in walking beyond the lab: “So while they’re out in the real world doing their regular stuff as they do on a daily basis and getting this constant stimuli and feedback from the muscles to the brain, we think it’s very likely we can then induce a much longer consistent effect of adapting their gait patterns.”Īfter a career studying other conditions, Fling joined CSU in 2016. These TENS units are something you can buy over the counter. “In our next set of studies, we’ll use something that’s called transcutaneous electric nerve stimulation. “The next step in our work is bringing folks back in again to do that same treadmill training paradigm, but now we pair it with wearable sensors that are providing them additional stimuli, said Fling, an associate professor in health and exercise science. Unfortunately, about 10 minutes after that, he said they reverted to their usual walk. Now, research at CSU’s Sensorimotor Neuroimaging Laboratory in the Department of Health and Exercise Science includes having MS patients walk on a split-belt treadmill to get people’s “bad leg” to work harder to catch up to their “good leg.”įling said that in about 10 minutes, people with MS are walking better. That thought fueled Fling’s motivation to study MS, which affects more than 900,000 Americans and more than 2.5 million people worldwide. It just seemed so radically different I didn’t get it.” “And that is one of those things that really struck me when I was a teenager was that you both have the same thing, and one of you is up here and one of you is down here. She was a wheelchair user very rapidly following her diagnosis and passed away from complications due to MS about five years ago. “Her sister, who was much younger, had a much more progressive form of it. “My mom has had MS for 30 years and is in pretty good shape, and it’s relatively well controlled by medication, so most days you’d never know she has it,” Fling said. Decades before Colorado State University researcher Brett Fling started finding innovative ways to help multiple sclerosis patients improve mobility, the disease was top of mind.
0 kommentar(er)
