Deans' stroke musings: Physiological responses and energy cost of walking on the Gait Trainer with and without body weight support in subacute 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.

Friday, April 18, 2014

Physiological responses and energy cost of walking on the Gait Trainer with and without body weight support in subacute stroke patients

No clue but I'm sure your therapist is all over this.
http://www.jneuroengrehab.com/content/11/1/54/abstract

Anna Sofia Delussu^*, Giovanni Morone, Marco Iosa, Maura Bragoni, Marco Traballesi and Stefano Paolucci

* Corresponding author: Anna S Delussu s.delussu@hsantalucia.it

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Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation 2014, 11:54 doi:10.1186/1743-0003-11-54
Published: 10 April 2014

Abstract

Background

Robotic-assisted walking after stroke provides intensive task-oriented training. But, despite the growing diffusion of robotic devices little information is available about cardiorespiratory and metabolic responses during electromechanically-assisted repetitive walking exercise. Aim of the study was to determine whether use of an end-effector gait training (GT) machine with body weight support (BWS) would affect physiological responses and energy cost of walking (ECW) in subacute post-stroke hemiplegic patients.

Methods

Participants: six patients (patient group: PG) with hemiplegia due to stroke (age: 66 ± 15y; time since stroke: 8 ± 3 weeks; four men) and 6 healthy subjects as control group (CG: age, 76 ± 7y; six men).

Interventions: overground walking test (OWT) and GT-assisted walking with 0%, 30% and 50% BWS (GT-BWS0%, 30% and 50%). Main Outcome Measures: heart rate (HR), pulmonary ventilation, oxygen consumption, respiratory exchange ratio (RER) and ECW.

Results

Intervention conditions significantly affected parameter values in steady state (HR: p = 0.005, V’E: p = 0.001, V'O₂: p < 0.001) and the interaction condition per group affected ECW (p = 0.002). For PG, the most energy (V’O₂ and ECW) demanding conditions were OWT and GT-BWS0%. On the contrary, for CG the least demanding condition was OWT. On the GT, increasing BWS produced a decrease in energy and cardiac demand in both groups.

Conclusions

In PG, GT-BWS walking resulted in less cardiometabolic demand than overground walking. This suggests that GT-BWS walking training might be safer than overground walking training in subacute stroke patients.