LISA BECK: Hi, I'm Lisa Beck. I'm one of the co-directors for the Neurorehab Summit 2014. This is our second conference here at Mayo Clinic focusing on neuroregeneration and rehabilitation throughout system of care.

One of our great speakers today was Pierre Asselin, who focused on outcomes after assistive technology and spinal cord injury, as well as body composition, bone mineral density, outcomes and treatments in spinal cord injury.

PIERRE ASSELIN: Hi, my name is Pierre Asselin. I presented secondary medical benefits to using exoskeletal assistive walking technologies, looking at improvements in gall bladder, body composition, such as lean mass changes, fat mass changes. And I gave an additional talk looking at different medical complications with losing muscle, gaining fat, and for people with spinal cord injury, different interventions that are available to this population to help prevent these type of adverse effects.

An additional portion to talk was looking at bone and how quickly do people lose bone, what's available out there, what's the potential for the future in these areas. The exoskeletal assisted walking technologies that we've investigated have gotten great benefits in changes in fat mass. So everybody that we've studied at this point in time has lost fat all throughout their body, in their legs, their arms, their trunk.

Lean muscle, some people that have gained some lean muscle mass. Some of them have not. We're not really sure why some do, why some don't, but it looks like those with some preserved function may increase in muscle. Though at this point, we can't conclude that specific--