VA Research Wrap Up: New findings on suicide risk, brain-computer interfaces and knee pain

This week, VA’s Office of Research and Development published three News Briefs highlighting research findings on how adverse childhood events affect suicide risk, brain-computer interfaces to restore hand function to paralyzed Veterans, and a new treatment for knee arthritis.

Childhood is a blind spot for many Veterans’ suicide risk

VA researchers from Eastern Oklahoma and Indianapolis used the VA electronic health record to examine 3,500 screenings for adverse childhood experiences, finding positive screens carried more than a 10% increased risk of suicidal thoughts and an almost 20% higher risk of suicidal behavior. The more alarming discovery, though, was that half of all those screenings, which occurred from 2018 to 2023, came from just three VA locations. This means the majority of Veterans are not screened for adverse childhood events at all.

Adverse childhood events include physical, verbal and sexual abuse; physical and emotional neglect; and household dysfunction that occur before the age of 18. The research suggests systematic adverse childhood experience screening could provide important information about Veterans’ suicide risk. View the full study from “Stress and Health.”

Brain mapping could restore hand function

Two paralyzed Veterans with spinal cord injuries volunteered to have two 96-channel microelectrode arrays implanted in their brains in order to map out the neural pathways associated with different hand, wrist and forearm motions. Researchers from Providence VA’s Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology placed the arrays into the area of the brain responsible for hand motor control and asked the participants to think about how they would make 48 different gestures while their brain activity was recorded. When all 48 hand gestures appeared in sequence, researchers were able to distinguish them as distinct gestures 70% of the time. Decoding accuracy jumped to 90% when the hand gesture sequences were limited to smaller groups of ten. The results of this brain mapping could be used to create brain-computer interfaces that will be able to restore complex hand gestures in people paralyzed from spinal cord injury by bypassing their damaged motor pathways. View the full study from “Communications Biology.”

Small changes in walking can lessen knee pain

Researchers from Palo Alto VA and Stanford University found personalized gait retraining effectively lessened pain and reduced knee cartilage damage in Veterans with medial compartment knee osteoarthritis, a common degenerative joint condition. Personalized gait retraining involved a six-session retraining program to make small gait changes, adjusting how far inward or outward the toes are pointed during foot placement by only 5-10 degrees. Sixty-eight study participants received gait evaluations before random assignment to either gait retraining or a sham treatment of their normal walking behavior. One year later, those Veterans who received the gait retraining still reported pain relief without the need for over-the-counter or stronger drugs, and no few adverse effects. The findings suggest gait adjustment could be a positive, non-surgical, non-medication intervention for a common knee ailment. View the full study from “The Lancet Rheumatology.”

For more Office of Research and Development updates, visit ORD online or go to https://www.research.va.gov/news_briefs/.