Deans' stroke musings: Spatio-temporal parameters and intralimb coordination patterns describing hemiparetic locomotion at controlled speed

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, June 13, 2013

Spatio-temporal parameters and intralimb coordination patterns describing hemiparetic locomotion at controlled speed

I'm sure your therapist can explain and use this information for you.
http://www.jneuroengrehab.com/content/10/1/53/abstract

Abstract (provisional)

Background

Comparison between healthy and hemiparetic gait is usually carried out while subjects walk overground at preferred speed. This generates bias due to the lack of uniformity across selected speeds because they reflect the great variability of the functional level of post-stroke patients. This study aimed at examining coordinative adaptations during walking in response to unilateral brain damage, while homologous participants walked at two fixed speeds.

Methods

Five patients with left and five with right chronic hemiparesis, characterized by similar level of motor functioning, were enrolled. Ten non-disabled volunteers were recruited as matched control group. Spatio-temporal parameters, and intralimb thigh-leg and leg-foot coordination patterns were used to compare groups while walking on a treadmill at 0.4 and 0.6 m/s. The likelihood of Continuous Relative Phase patterns between healthy and hemiparetic subjects was evaluated by means of the root mean square of the difference and the cross correlation coefficient. The effects of the group (i.e., healthy vs. hemiparetics), side (i.e., affected vs.unaffected), and speed (e.g., slow vs. fast) were analyzed on all metrics using the Analysis of Variance.

Results

Spatio-temporal parameters of all hemiparetic subjects did not significantly differ from those of healthy subjects nor showed any asymmetry between affected and unaffected limbs. Conversely, both thigh-leg and foot-leg coordination patterns appeared to account for pathology related modifications.

Conclusion

Comparisons between hemiparetic and healthy gait should be carried out when all participants are asked to seek the same suitable dynamic equilibrium led by the same external (i.e., the speed) and internal (i.e., severity of the pathology) conditions. In this respect, biomechanical adaptations reflecting the pathology can be better highlighted by coordinative patterns of coupled segments within each limb than by the spatio-temporal parameters. Accordingly, a deep analysis of the intralimb coordination may be helpful for clinicians while designing therapeutic treatments.