Review Article on Upper Extremity Nerve Transfer Published with Australian Research Partners

An important state-of-the-art paper entitled “Review of Upper Extremity Nerve Transfer in Cervical Spinal Cord Injury” was published in the open-access journal “Brachial Plexus and Peripheral Nerve Injury“. Together with first and last authors Sarah Cain and Natasha van Zyl from University of Melbourne, Australia, Andreas Gohritz and Jan Fridén summarized an analysis of  all nerve transfer cases published to date in the literature. This review summarizes the functional results in 59 cases with 89 nerve transfers performed, including 15 cases of double-nerve transfer and 1 case of triple-nerve transfer from 13 studies with extractable data. Overall, 89 nerve transfers have been performed in 57 males and 2 females with a mean age of 34 years. The mean SCI level was C6 (range: C5–7), time to surgery post-SCI was 19.9 months (range: 4.1–156 months), and follow-up time was 18.2 months (range: 3–60 months). All case reports recorded a Medical Research Council (MRC) score of 3 or 4 for recipient muscle power, but two early case series reported more variable results.