Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Muscle 'Synergies' May Be Key to Stroke Treatment

Sound like Brunnstrom theory.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091020162243.htm
Researchers at MIT and San Camillo Hospital in Venice, Italy, have shown that motor impairments in stroke patients can be understood as impairments in specific combinations of muscle activity, known as synergies.


Previous work in animals and humans has shown that groups of muscles tend to be co-activated as a unit in predicable patterns, or synergies, across a wide range of movements. These synergies are thought to represent the fundamental building blocks from which the brain constructs complex movements. The new findings support this concept and also suggest new approaches to the rehabilitation of stroke patients. Stroke is a leading cause of long-term disability in the United States, with about 700,000 new or recurrent cases each year.

The researchers, led by Emilio Bizzi, an MIT Institute Professor and a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, used electromyographic (EMG) recording to measure activity in arm and shoulder muscles of eight stroke patients as they performed a variety of reaching movements. The patients had stroke damage in one cortical hemisphere only, so one arm was impaired while the other was largely unaffected.

The researchers used computational methods to identify groups of muscles whose activation was correlated across movements. In seven out of eight patients, these correlations, or synergies, were largely identical between the affected and unaffected arms, even though the actual movements were very different between the two arms. The results support the view that the synergies are encoded in the brainstem or spinal cord, areas that were unaffected in these patients.

"We show that descending neural signals from the motor cortex select, activate and combine a small number of muscle synergies specified by networks in the spinal cord or brainstem," Bizzi explains, "and different movements emerge as these synergies are recruited to various degrees."

The findings suggest a new approach to the rehabilitation of stroke patients. By identifying synergies whose activations are affected following a stroke, it may be possible to develop focused rehabilitation methods that specifically train the impaired synergies. As a first step toward this goal, the researchers plan to monitor a group of stroke patients as they undergo rehabilitation therapy, to determine whether the post-stroke improvements in motor function can be explained as changes in the activation pattern of specific synergies.

Funding was provided by the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and the Italian Ministry of Health Grant.

No comments:

Post a Comment