Dr Jimena Quinzaños
Dr Quinzaños’ group comprises medical doctors, engineers and researchers at Instituto Nacional de Rehabilitación Luis Guillermo Ibarra Ibarra (INRLGII). Their research activity has focused on motor control in spinal cord injury, mainly trunk control and gait. For this, they have consolidated a close collaboration with researchers and other medical specialists. Clinical research has provided good results with development and validation of evaluation tools related to trunk control and gait. The group has obtained grants that have supported clinical trials on interventions to improve those functions, and upper limb motor control. Finally, they began to explore the market with the development of an App, supported by the SPARK program in Mexico. Their vision is to continue working on patient care, research and education to improve life quality of people with spinal cord injury in Mexico and other countries of Latin America and the entire world.
This group of SCI researchers and attending clinicians are working on three main lines of research: trunk control in SCI, gait in SCI, and epidemiology of SCI. They have papers and ongoing protocols aligned with these lines of research, and want to improve these works by collaborating with other researchers, clinicians and institutions to share knowledge, create networks and improve internal and external validity of their research. They have 11 papers related to the previously mentioned lines of research published on spinal cord journals, and more than 20 oral and poster presentations and one instructional course in ASIA and ISCoS meetings. Three of their works have been accepted for ISCoS 2021. Attendance at ISCoS 2021 will enable creation of new networks for research purposes, and an opportunity to improve internal validity of their work by means of feedback from other researchers and SCI professionals. Potential multicentre studies could also help assure external validity of the results.
Dr Quinzaños and her team received a 2021 SCI Collaboration Grant to attend ISCoS 2021:Virtual. The team comprises:
- Dr Jimena Quinzaños, National Institute of Rehabilitation, Mexico
- Dr Aida Barrera, National Institute of Rehabilitation, Mexico
- Dr Alberto Isaac Perez Sanpablo, National Institute of Rehabilitation, Mexico
- Dr Cristina Quezada Lopez, National Institute of Rehabilitation, Mexico
- Dr Monserrat Palomino, National Institute of Rehabilitation, Mexico
The research group share their experiences from the conference.
“Attendance at ISCoS was a great experience for all the group members since it allowed us to participate in an international forum of experts in spinal cord injury. In this respect, the attendance helped to expand our collaboration horizons beyond the national and regional levels. Particularly, the interaction with other specialists and researchers in the poster presentation was a very rewarding experience.
Moreover, as a SRI grantee group, we were able to meet researchers and clinicians around the world via a zoom meeting, and have access to their contacts. We are planning to contact some of the persons with similar research interests to start collaborations.
Additional benefits from attending the conference were mainly academic. In fact, as clinicians, we had the opportunity of learning innovative treatments for our patients with spinal cord injuries.
We were sincerely surprised by the fact that in a region as distant as the Asian region and specifically Japan they have been interested in validating the translation into their language of the trunk control scale developed in our working group.
Most of the information we have learnt at ISCoS has been implemented mainly in our in-patient area. In particular, functional electrical stimulation to prevent and treat respiratory and cardiovascular complications in tetraplegics is now a routinely used, with excellent results.
Furthermore, it definitely motivates us to continue with the development of evaluation instruments and expand our horizons to other areas, that is, not only trunk control, gait and upper limb function, but also to consider cardiovascular and respiratory health.
The highlight was definitely the opportunity of meeting people with similar interests to start collaborations, and to share our work so that people outside of our country and region can start to use our findings.”
