Deans' stroke musings: Combined Central and Peripheral Stimulation to Facilitate Motor Recovery After Stroke The Effect of Number of Sessions on Outcome

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.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Combined Central and Peripheral Stimulation to Facilitate Motor Recovery After Stroke The Effect of Number of Sessions on Outcome

Another high-tech therapy you'll have to hope your clinic has if applicable. But it was on chronic patients. I tried to get into a research study for this but my finger control area is completely dead. It probably requires the area being stimulated be in the penumbra. But I know nothing, thats what your doctors are for.
http://nnr.sagepub.com/content/26/5/479.abstract?etoc

Abstract

Background. Proof-of-principle studies have demonstrated transient beneficial effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on motor function in stroke patients, mostly after single treatment sessions. Objective. To assess the efficacy of multiple treatment sessions on motor outcome. Methods. The authors examined the effects of two 5-day intervention periods of bihemispheric tDCS and simultaneous occupational/physical therapy on motor function in a group of 10 chronic stroke patients. Results. The first 5-day period yielded an increase in Upper-Extremity Fugl-Meyer (UE-FM) scores by 5.9 ± 2.4 points (16.6% ± 10.6%). The second 5-day period resulted in further meaningful, although significantly lower, gains with an additional improvement of 2.3 ± 1.4 points in UE-FM compared with the end of the first 5-day period (5.5% ± 4.2%). The overall mean change after the 2 periods was 8.2 ± 2.2 points (22.9% ± 11.4%). Conclusion. The results confirm the efficacy of bihemispheric tDCS in combination with peripheral sensorimotor stimulation. Furthermore, they demonstrate that the effects of multiple treatment sessions in chronic stroke patients may not necessarily lead to a linear response function, which is of relevance for the design of experimental neurorehabilitation trials.