Abstract
Operant conditioning of a spinal reflex can modify specific spinal cord pathways and can thereby affect behaviors that use these pathways. We have shown that down-conditioning the soleus H-reflex during standing can improve walking in people with chronic incomplete spinal cord injury (SCI); after successful conditioning people walked faster and more symmetrically with better locomotor EMG activity [1]. Based on this success, we are currently testing the hypothesis that locomotor reflex activity can be further improved toward a more normal pattern by reducing the soleus H-reflex size during the swing phase of the gait cycle, where the H-reflex is very small or absent in normal subjects but abnormally large in people with spasticity due to chronic SCI.
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References
A.K. Thompson, F.R. Pomerantz, J.R. Wolpaw, Operant conditioning of a spinal reflex can improve locomotion after spinal cord injury in humans. J. Neurosci. 33(6), 2365–2375 (2013)
A.K. Thompson, X.Y. Chen, J.R. Wolpaw, Acquisition of a simple motor skill: task-dependent adaptation plus long-term change in the human soleus H-reflex. J. Neurosci. 29(18), 5784–5792 (2009)
Y. Makihara, R.L. Segal, J.R. Wolpaw, A.K. Thompson, Operant conditioning of the soleus H-reflex does not induce long-term changes in the gastrocnemius H-reflexes and does not disturb normal locomotion in humans. J. Neurophysiol. 112(6), 1439–1446 (2014)
Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by the New York State Spinal Cord Injury Research Trust (C023685 and C029131 to A.K.T.), the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NS069551 to A.K.T., NS022189 and NS061823 to J.R. Wolpaw and X. Chen), the Helen Hayes Hospital Foundation (to A.K.T.), and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (GM104941 to Binder-MacLeod).
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Thompson, A.K., Pudlik, S.D., Thompson, C.R. (2017). Effects of H-Reflex Operant Conditioning in Humans. In: Ibáñez, J., González-Vargas, J., AzorÃn, J., Akay, M., Pons, J. (eds) Converging Clinical and Engineering Research on Neurorehabilitation II. Biosystems & Biorobotics, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46669-9_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46669-9_10
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