Divers have long known that scuba diving is awe-inspiring and exciting but a recent study of army veterans learning to dive has shown it may also be beneficial for people with spinal cord injuries.

In the first study of its kind, researchers from Johns Hopkins monitored a group of 10 wheelchair-bound people learning to dive. The results proved dramatic.

The divers showed significant improvement in muscle movement, increased sensitivity to light touch and pinprick on the legs and large reductions in post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, said Dr. Adam Kaplin, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural services at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

“There is no treatment for people with chronic spinal cord injury and many believe once you’ve lost the communication between the brain and the extremities, there is nothing you can do to restore lost function,” said Dr. Kaplin. “What we saw in the water strongly suggests there is some scuba-facilitated restoration of neurological and psychological function in paraplegics. It’s very provocative.”

Researchers found an average 15 per cent reduction in muscle spasticity in the disabled veterans and an average 10 per cent increase in sensitivity to light touch and five per cent to pinprick. In some of the divers, the improvement in tone, sensation or motor function was between 20 and 30 per cent.

The study was the brainchild of 24-year-old Cody Unser, daughter of champion racecar driver Al Unser Junior. She has been paralysed from the chest down since the age of 12 as a result of transverse myelitis, a neurologic syndrome caused by inflammation of the spinal cord.

Shelley Unser, president of her daughter’s foundation, the Cody Unser First Step Foundation, said Cody has been diving for years and that the activity leaves her with more feeling in her legs. Mrs. Unser said her daughter’s determination to prove that diving helped wheelchair-dependent people was bolstered by Superman actor Christopher Reeves, who was paralysed in a horse riding accident in 1995 and died in 2004. “He told her she had to put science behind it,” Mrs. Unser said.

Although Dr. Kaplin was sceptical at first, when Cody brought him to a scuba training session in Pennsylvania to talk to other wheelchair-dependent people, he heard the same story from them and decided to investigate further.

He and fellow researcher Daniel Becker from the International Centre for Spinal Cord Injury at Kennedy Krieger Institute travelled to Cayman in May 2011 to put the veterans through their paces – monitoring their reactions, and the reactions of non-paralysed members of a control group, before their dives and again 24 hours later.

All the paralysed divers reported improvement in movement, with the effects lasting about one month, Dr. Kaplin.

He admits the improvements may be due to a feel good factor of being on a Caribbean vacation and diving a beautiful reef, but that would not be enough to account for the decrease, on average, of 80 per cent in post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.

“They were challenged with something that made them anxious and they mastered it,” Dr. Kaplin said, adding that the regulated breathing that keeps the body buoyant underwater may help the veterans relax and better control their symptoms.

The researchers cautioned that the results were preliminary, as the study size was small and the duration of the benefits were unknown. However, they said the findings suggest a pathway for restoring neurological and psychological function in paraplegics that has been overlooked thus far.

The research team presented their findings in September at the Paralysed Veterans of America’s Spinal Cord Injury Summit in Florida.