Deans' stroke musings: Does Action Observation Training With Immediate Physical Practice Improve Hemiparetic Upper-Limb Function in Chronic Stroke?

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, September 23, 2015

Does Action Observation Training With Immediate Physical Practice Improve Hemiparetic Upper-Limb Function in Chronic Stroke?

The answer once again is yes. When the FUCKING HELL is this going to be written up into a publicly available stroke protocol? I'm guessing never because we have totally craptastic stroke associations doing nothing for survivors. And this is for chronic.
http://nnr.sagepub.com/content/29/9/807?etoc

¹Murdoch University, Perth, Australia
²University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
³Western Australian Neuroscience Research Institute (WANRI), Perth, Australia

Sean Müller, PhD, School of Psychology and Exercise Science, Murdoch University, 90 South Street, Murdoch, WA 6150, Australia. Email: s.muller@murdoch.edu.au

Abstract

Background. The mirror neuron network provides a neural mechanism to prime the motor system through action observation in stroke survivors.

Objective. To examine whether action observation training with immediate physical practice improves upper-limb function in chronic stroke.

Methods. In a within-subject design, 14 chronic stroke survivors were assessed at baseline, then participated in 2 weeks of relaxation-sham plus physical practice (control) and reassessed. Thereafter, they participated in 2 weeks of action observation training coupled with immediate physical practice (intervention), followed by a final assessment. Duration of each action observation video sequence (priming exposure) was 30 s followed immediately by practice of the observed motor skill. Results. There were significant improvements in control and intervention phases on primary outcome measures—Upper Extremity Fugl-Meyer Motor Assessment (FMA) and Functional Test of the Hemiparetic Upper Extremity (FTHUE)—as well as secondary outcome measures of self-perceptions of arm use. Gains in the primary outcomes were greater during the intervention phase (action observation + physical practice; FMA, 10.64; FTHUE level, 0.79, and tasks, 1.57) than during the control phase (relaxation-sham plus physical practice; FMA, 6.64; FTHUE level, 0.43, and tasks, 1.00). Interviews with participants highlighted the added value of watching an actor perform the movement before physically attempting to perform the action.

Conclusions. This study provides preliminary evidence of the additive value of action observation plus physical practice over relaxation-sham plus physical practice. There appears to be capacity for further recovery of upper-limb function in chronic stroke that persists at least in the short term.