Deans' stroke musings: quantitative measurement of spasticity: Effect of Cutaneous Electrical Stimulation

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.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

quantitative measurement of spasticity: Effect of Cutaneous Electrical Stimulation

You'll have to read the article at the url
http://www.theneuroinstitute.com/research/medref/021%20LIB%20PAPER.pdf

Abstract

The goal of this research was to determine if cutaneous electrotherapy would temporarily reduce muscle spasticity. Five traumatically brain injured (TBI) and five spinal cord injured (SCI) subjects, all with clinically evident spasticity, received surface electrical stimulation over the tibialis anterior muscle. Using the Spasticity Measurement System, stiffness around the ankle was measured before, immediately after, and 24 hours after treatment. With stimulation, ipsilateral ankle viscoelastic stiffness immediately decreased in 9 of 10 subjects and remained significantly depressed for up to 24 hours. Contralateral ankle spasticity did not significantly change. Using the same subjects under sham conditions, no significant decrements in spasticity occurred. In a subjective survey, only SCI participants reported functionally evident spasticity reductions. Also within this subgroup, efficacy of treatment was directly proportional to the severity of pre-stimulation clonus. We conclude that (1) cutaneous electrotherapy transiently decreases both TBI and SCI related spasticity and (2) pre-stimulation clonus may function as a clinical indicator of SCI patients most likely to benefit from this process.