Deans' stroke musings: Peroneal FES Better than AFO for Chronic Foot Drop Patients Post-Stroke, Study Finds

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.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Peroneal FES Better than AFO for Chronic Foot Drop Patients Post-Stroke, Study Finds

The problem here is that they don't tell you what type of FES they are using; plain eStim, Bioness, WalkAide?
http://www.ptproductsonline.com/news/2012-03-07_01.asp
While walking ability of individuals with chronic foot drop phase post-stroke has been found to be better with functional electrical stimulation (FES) of the peroneal nerve than without an orthotic device, evidence is conclusive as to whether peroneal FES is also better that ankle-foot orthosis (AFO) in this regard. A recent study, published in the March 2012 issue of Physical Therapy, aims to identify potential benefits of peroneal FES as opposed to an AFO with respect to the ability to negotiate a sudden obstacle.

Led by Roos van Swigchem, PT, MSc, from the department of rehabilitation at the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre and Nijmegen Centre for Evidence-Based Practice, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, the research team fitted 24 community-dwelling people with stroke who regularly used polypropylene AFO with a transcutaneous FES device. The average age of the participants was 52.6 years.

After 2 weeks and 8 weeks, the researchers tested participants’ obstacle avoidance ability by asking them to avoid 30 obstacles suddenly dropped on a treadmill in front of the affect leg as the participants walked with either FES or AFO. The obstacle avoidance success rates were determined.

According to the results, success rates were higher with FES than with AFO, especially after adjustment for individual leg muscle strength. Participants with relatively low muscle strength were found to most likely benefit from FES in regards to obstacle avoidance ability.

The researchers conclude that peroneal FES seems to be superior to an AFO when it comes to obstacle avoidance ability in community-dwelling people with stroke. However, they note that further work is needed to determine whether the results may be generalized to other groups of people with stroke.