Former undergraduate student and now lab staff member, Maya, recently published an article on the knowledge, attitudes, and practices related to pelvic floor muscle training among people with spinal cord injury. This survey included people with SCI from across North America and revealed that that while people with SCI are interested in this type of therapy, very few people have tried pelvic floor muscle training. Read the full article here!

Our recent publication explores how the pelvic floor muscles are active during walking and jogging in able-bodied men and women. This is the first paper to characterize pelvic floor muscle activity during the entire gait cycle and hints at how these muscles work during physical activity to prevent incontinence. Check out the full paper here.

Special thanks to everyone who participated in this study!

Check out our recent publication on the effects of exoskeleton-assisted walking to improve urogenital outcomes, such as urinary incontinence, for people with spinal cord injury. Preliminary data from this paper was first presented by Dr. Lam at the 2019 International Continence Society in Sweden, and we are excited to publish the final results! Read the full paper here.

Our Master’s student, Gevorg, and Lab Manager, Ali, published an article about the effects of seated boxing and battle rope exercises on trunk muscle activity for people with motor-complete spinal cord injury. This paper adds to the growing body of literature that people with high-thoracic and cervical motor-complete injuries have some degree of voluntary muscle activation in their abdominal and lower back muscles. Read the whole publication here.

This work was a part of Konrad’s undergraduate directed studies project. Way to go team!

In March 2019, previous postdoctoral fellow Dr. Amanda Chisholm published her study investigating the proprioceptive deficits of individuals with motor-incomplete SCI and how this impacted the learning of a precision walking skill. Compared to able-bodied controls, individuals with motor-incomplete SCI were able to achieve the same level of performance accuracy, although more practice was required to learn the skill. Check out the publication to learn more.

Congratulations to authors Dr. Amanda Chishlom, Taha Qaiser, Alison Williams, Gevorg Eginyan, and Dr. Tania Lam.

Over the past two years, we have had the pleasure of collaborating with Dr. Andrei Krassioukov’s laboratory to investigate the effects of epidural stimulation on autonomic function. Our first case report (2018) demonstrated that epidural spinal cord stimulation may be help manage cardiovascular dysfunction in individuals with chronic SCI. Click here to learn more.

In our second study (2019), we demonstrated how epidural stimulation can improve upper body exercise capacity via the modulation of cardiovascular and respiratory function. The full study can be found here.

Thank you to the many authors and contributors of these two publications, from our lab as well as others. We are very excited to continue our collaboration with Dr. Krassioukov’s group – look out for more papers from our labs in the future!