Deans' stroke musings: Brain Activation in Primary Motor and Somatosensory Cortices during Motor Imagery Correlates with Motor Imagery Ability in Stroke Patients

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.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Brain Activation in Primary Motor and Somatosensory Cortices during Motor Imagery Correlates with Motor Imagery Ability in Stroke Patients

Your doctor should be able to translate this into a stroke protocol.
Full article at the link.
http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/neurology/2012/613595/
Abstract
Aims. While studies on healthy subjects have shown a partial overlap between the motor execution and motor imagery neural circuits, few have investigated brain activity during motor imagery in stroke patients with hemiparesis. This work is aimed at examining similarities between motor imagery and execution in a group of stroke patients. Materials and Methods. Eleven patients were asked to perform a visuomotor tracking task by either physically or mentally tracking a sine wave force target using their thumb and index finger during fMRI scanning. MIQ-RS questionnaire has been administered. Results and Conclusion. Whole-brain analyses confirmed shared neural substrates between motor imagery and motor execution in bilateral premotor cortex, SMA, and in the contralesional inferior parietal lobule. Additional region of interest-based analyses revealed a negative correlation between kinaesthetic imagery ability and percentage BOLD change in areas 4p and 3a; higher imagery ability was associated with negative and lower percentage BOLD change in primary sensorimotor areas during motor imagery.1.

Introduction
The residual disability after stroke is substantial, with about 65% of patients at 6 months unable to effectively incorporate the paretic hand into daily activities [1, 2]. In turn, the degree of functional deficit contributes to a reduced quality of life after stroke [2–6]. Studies on healthy volunteers have shown that mental practice with motor imagery can improve the performance of motor skill behaviours [7, 8]. Motor imagery can be defined as a dynamic state during which the representation of a specific motor action is internally reactivated within working memory without any overt motor output [9]. According to the motor simulation hypothesis [10], and the grounded cognition perspective [11], represented actions correspond to covert, quasi-executed actions, involving a partial reenactment of the mechanisms that normally participate in various stages of action generation [10]. Therefore, motor imagery is a cognitive process based on sensorimotor simulation mechanisms, where individuals implicitly reenact actions without producing an overt motor output [10]. A certain degree of similarity between brain areas activated during motor imagery and execution has indeed been demonstrated [10, 12], providing empirical support for such theoretical framework.