Recovery Tougher For Seniors With Spinal Cord Injury

MONDAY, Dec. 29, 2025 (HealthDay News) — It’s tougher for older folks to recover from a spinal cord injury, a new study reports.

Seniors recover just as well as young people when it comes to healing their nervous system, including getting their strength back and regaining sensory function.

But they have worse recovery of their functional capabilities, winding up less able to perform tasks like feeding themselves, bathing, handling their bathroom needs or walking.

And the older a person is, the more they'll struggle to recover from a spinal cord injury, researchers concluded.

“With population growth and improvements in medicine, the number of people diagnosed with spinal cord injury is increasing and the average age at the time of injury is rising,” said lead researcher Dr. Chiara Pavese, an associate professor with the University of Pavia in Italy.

“Despite substantial advances in medicine and surgery over the past decades, the rate of recovery after spinal cord injury has remained the same,” Pavese said in a news release. “Our results may help researchers design studies tailored by people’s age to evaluate new therapies and approaches for people with spinal cord injury.”

For the new study, researchers tracked nearly 2,200 European patients for one year after a spinal cord injury.

Older folks recovered strength in their upper and lower bodies as well as younger people, and were just as able to sense a light touch or a pin prick.

But they were less likely to regain their ability to live independently. Tests showed slower recuperation when it came to handling activities of daily life.

Those functional tests run from 0 to 100, with a higher score indicating better recovery. Overall, participants entered recovery with an average score of 31, and after a year scores had increased to 35.

For every decade older a patient was, they scored 4.3 points lower on functional tests after a year of rehab.

Likewise, seniors demonstrated less improvement on all walking tests than younger people, the study showed.

Researchers particularly found a noticeable reduction in function recovery among people older than 70.

Seniors with a spinal cord injury likely start out behind the eight-ball, with other health problems like muscle loss, arthritis and age-related cognitive decline interfering with their recovery, researchers speculated in their study.

“People older than 70 need specific approaches to rehabilitation that take into account other conditions they may be living with, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes or osteoporosis, and help them with recovery that applies to their daily lives,” Pavese said.

The findings were published Dec. 23 in the journal Neurology.

More information

The Mayo Clinic has more on spinal cord injury rehabilitation.

SOURCE: American Academy of Neurology, news release, Dec. 23, 2025

What This Means For You

Seniors can expect a rocky road following a spinal cord injury, with a more challenging rehabilitation.