Improving Walking After Spinal Cord Injury

Locomotor recovery is one of the most important goals of individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI). Ambulatory deficits severely impact daily functions resulting in lower quality of life for people living with paralysis due to SCI. Although studies have shown that locomotor training improves locomotor function in people with chronic SCI, the benefits remain limited. Our overall hypothesis is that we can engage additional descending motor pathways, such as the reticulospinal tract (RST), to improve locomotor function in humans with chronic incomplete SCI. In this study we propose to test the effects of a novel intervention that uses repeated paired loud auditory and electrical stimulation of muscle afferents combined with locomotor training on walking speed and voluntary muscle strength.

NCT Number	NCT07223710
Lead Sponsor	Shirley Ryan AbilityLab Collaborators: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)
Conditions	Spinal Cord Injury
Enrollment	20 participants
Start Date	2025-11-15
Primary Completion	2026-03-30 (estimated)
Study Completion	2026-07-30 (estimated)
Updated on ClinicalTrials.gov	2025-11-03