In the summer of 2020 at the age of 16, due to a motorcycle accident far from his home in Lugo, in the Ravenna area, he had suffered the amputation of an arm.
Today Davide, who has meanwhile come of age, after having a prosthesis fitted at the Maria Cecilia Hospital in Cotignola, also in the Ravenna area, has enrolled at the university to become a professor of physical education.
The neurosurgical technique used on him - they explain from the Romagna structure - is the Tmr, a re-innervation of the target muscles for prosthesis grafting, which allows you to bypass the brain's memory to control the artificial limb.
In general, it is estimated that there are over three thousand cases of amputation of an upper limb every year in Italy due to pathologies or traumatic events.
However, the use of a prosthesis requires a long process of preparation and rehabilitation: the Tmr serves precisely this purpose.
National pioneer is the neurosurgeon Guido Staffa, of the Maria Cecilia Hospital, a clinic accredited with the national health system.
In the last four years, seven Tmr operations have been performed in our country, all by the team led by Staffa.
In the world there have been about fifty similar interventions so far.
"The function of the Tmr is to create the conditions for the prosthetic implant - observes Staffa - years ago I was part of a study group on amputees: the implanted electric prostheses were not used well by patients as they must contract to perform the movement muscles which are, however, assigned to different movements. Our brain refuses to use movements other than those for which it was designed. Hence the idea of implanting the nerves of the residual part of the amputation,
that is, those that remained in the stump, on these muscles to obtain their activation.
Thus the human limit is bypassed".
Before the accident, Davide recalled, on a motorbike, "I played volleyball, a passion that continued playing sitting volleyball, the Paralympic volleyball. Today I also dedicate myself to my studies: not being able to be a policeman, my big dream as a child, nor to undertake a career in electrical engineering for the manual jobs it requires, address of the high schools I attended, I enrolled at the University to become a professor of physical education with the hope in the future of being able to show how the impairment does not necessarily constitute a limit and how to face a problem obtaining a new opportunity".
