Recovery following peripheral nerve injuries is often incomplete. Injured nerves regenerate at a rate of approximately 1mm\/day, but the longer they are without a functional connection the more diminished their capacity to regenerate becomes. In traumatic injuries, the gold standard treatment is surgical nerve repair performed immediately or shortly after injury. To date, there are no additional treatments that are used to enhance functional recovery. In this talk I will outline ongoing experiments investigating a clinically translatable daily electrical muscle stimulation paradigm in rats following nerve injury. I will also discuss a treatment of brief electrical nerve stimulation performed at the time of nerve repair that is used to accelerate nerve outgrowth across the injury site. Taken together, these two therapies may form a synergistic front used to enhance recovery following peripheral nerve injuries.<\/p>\n
Dr. Michael Willand is currently a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Plastic Surgery at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Mike previously completed MASc and PhD degrees in biomedical engineering at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He specialized in the design and development of novel electrical stimulators and investigated combining surgical modalities with electrical muscle stimulation to enhance functional recovery following peripheral nerve injury. His current work focuses on examining how different paradigms of electrical muscle stimulation affect reinnervation following nerve injury and repair. He is also investigating the role that electrical stimulation has in synkinetic reinnervation and the molecular basis for enhancement of reinnervation following chronic muscle stimulation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Abstract Recovery following peripheral nerve injuries is often incomplete. Injured nerves regenerate at a rate of approximately 1mm\/day, but the longer they are without a functional connection the more diminished …","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"pgc_meta":"","_tribe_events_status":"","_tribe_events_status_reason":""},"tags":[],"tribe_events_cat":[20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reltoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/1014"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reltoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reltoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/tribe_events"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reltoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reltoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1014"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/reltoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/1014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1015,"href":"https:\/\/reltoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/1014\/revisions\/1015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reltoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reltoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1014"},{"taxonomy":"tribe_events_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reltoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events_cat?post=1014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}