Deans' stroke musings: Motor imagery training improves precision of an upper limb movement in patients with hemiparesis

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.

Monday, April 20, 2015

Motor imagery training improves precision of an upper limb movement in patients with hemiparesis

How many decades before your stroke department has thousands of hours of guided imagery for you to think about? I'll guess 50 years. Now if they would compare motor imagery to action observation we would have something useful for survivors. Don't do this on your own, think how dangerous it is to think about your movements.
http://iospress.metapress.com/content/t67557518727350w/

Luzia Grabherr^{1, 2}, Corinne Jola³, Gilberto Berra⁴, Robert Theiler⁴, Fred W. Mast¹

¹Department of Psychology, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
²School of Health Sciences, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia
³Division of Social and Health Sciences - Psychology, Abertay University, Dundee, UK
⁴Department of Rheumatology, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Triemli City Hospital, Zurich, Switzerland

Abstract

BACKGROUND: In healthy participants, beneficial effects of motor imagery training on movement execution have been shown for precision, strength, and speed. In the clinical context, it is still debated whether motor imagery provides an effective rehabilitation technique in patients with motor deficits. OBJECTIVE: To compare the effectiveness of two different types of movement training: motor imagery vs. motor execution. METHODS: Twenty-five patients with hemiparesis were assigned to one of two training groups: the imagery or the execution-training group. Both groups completed a baseline test before they received six training sessions, each of which was followed by a test session. Using a novel and precisely quantifiable test, we assessed how accurately patients performed an upper limb movement. RESULTS: Both training groups improved performance over the six test sessions but the improvement was significantly larger in the imagery group. That is, the imagery group was able to perform more precise movements than the execution group after the sixth training session while there was no difference at the beginning of the training. CONCLUSIONS: The results provide evidence for the benefit of motor imagery training in patients with hemiparesis and thus suggest the integration of cognitive training in conventional physiotherapy practice.