Ultrasound accelerates functional recovery after peripheral nerve damage

Peripheral nerve injury is a common clinical problem that often debilitates by producing significant motor and sensory deficits, as well as pain and other unpleasant sensations. Recovery is often slow: Patients with proximal injuries that require axons to regenerate over long distances to reach their target muscles or sensory receptors can take up to two years to recover function. Moreover, slow recovery can produce incomplete recovery due to the associated muscle atrophy, decrease in axonal regeneration along the pathway of the degenerating nerve, and decay in the axonal receptivity of the target tissues. In this work, we show that therapeutic ultrasound can accelerate functional recovery in an animal model of a completely crushed peripheral nerve.