Deans' stroke musings: KINESTHETIC IMAGERY TRAINING OF FORCEFUL MUSCLE CONTRACTIONS INCREASES BRAIN SIGNAL AND MUSCLE STRENGTH

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, August 28, 2013

KINESTHETIC IMAGERY TRAINING OF FORCEFUL MUSCLE CONTRACTIONS INCREASES BRAIN SIGNAL AND MUSCLE STRENGTH

And your great stroke association would followup this with research on survivors. Otherwise this will never get done. What do you expect? You're screwed, nobody cares except for other survivors who hope that your recovery will miraculously extend to them thru quantum entanglement or maybe worm-holes.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?hl=en&q=http://www.frontiersin.org/Human_Neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00561/abstract&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm2LaQ8Pj1AZ-JibABYR8t_09-wbMQ&oi=scholaralrt

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Wan X. Yao¹, Vinoth K. Ranganathan^{2, 3}, Didier Allexandre⁴, Vlodek Siemionow^{2, 3} and Guang H. Yue^{2, 3, 4*}

¹Health and Kinesiology, University of Texas at San Antonio, USA
²Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Cleveland Clinic, USA
³Biomedical Engineering, Cleveland Clinic, USA
⁴ Kessler Foundation Research Center, USA

The purpose of this study was to compare the effect of training using internal imagery (IMI; also known as kinesthetic imagery or first person imagery) with that of external imagery (EMI; also known as third-person visual imagery) of strong muscle contractions on voluntary muscle strengthening. Eighteen young, healthy subjects were randomly assigned to one of three groups (6 in each group): internal motor imagery (IMI), external motor imagery (EMI), or a no-practice control (CTRL) group. Training lasted for 6 weeks (~15 min/day, 5 days/week). The participants’ right arm elbow-flexion strength, muscle electrical activity and movement-related cortical potential (MRCP) were evaluated before and after training. Only the IMI group showed significant strength gained (10.8%) while the EMI (4.8%) and CTRL (-3.3%) groups did not. Only the IMI group showed a significant elevation in MRCP on scalp locations over both the primary motor (M1) and supplementary motor cortices (EMI group over M1 only) and this increase was significantly greater than that of EMI and CTRL groups. These results suggest that training by IMI of forceful muscle contractions was effective in improving voluntary muscle strength without physical exercise. We suggest that the IMI training likely strengthened brain-to-muscle (BTM) command that may have improved motor unit recruitment and activation, and led to greater muscle output. Training by internal motor imagery of forceful muscle contractions may change the activity level of cortical motor control network, which may translate into greater descending command to the target muscle and increase its strength.