Combining Robotic Training and Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation in Severe Upper Limb-Impaired Chronic Stroke Patients

Damn it all, write up a fucking protocol so it can be critiqued and refined or improved upon.  Because we have no one writing protocols no one knows what else is going on in other areas of the world. As a result stroke survivors are badly served. A great stroke association president would be knocking heads over this lack of professionalism.  And yet our fucking failures of stroke associations  do nothing to solve this problem. DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!

Combining Robotic Training and Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation in Severe Upper Limb-Impaired Chronic Stroke Patients

Vincenzo Di Lazzaro^1,2*, Fioravante Capone^1,2, Giovanni Di Pino^1,2, Giovanni Pellegrino¹, Lucia Florio¹, Loredana Zollo³, Davide Simonetti³, Federico Ranieri^1,2, Nicoletta Brunelli^1,2, Marzia Corbetto^1,2, Sandra Miccinilli⁴, Marco Bravi⁴, Stefano Milighetti⁴, Eugenio Guglielmelli³ and Silvia Sterzi⁴

• ¹Unit of Neurology, Neurophysiology, Neurobiology, Department of Medicine, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Rome, Italy
• ²Fondazione Alberto Sordi - Research Institute for Ageing, Rome, Italy
• ³Unit of Biomedical Robotics and Biomicrosystems, Department of Engineering, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Rome, Italy
• ⁴Unit of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine, Department of Medicine, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Rome, Italy

Previous studies suggested that both robot-assisted rehabilitation and non-invasive brain stimulation can produce a slight improvement in severe chronic stroke patients. It is still unknown whether their combination can produce synergistic and more consistent improvements. Safety and efficacy of this combination has been assessed within a proof-of-principle, double-blinded, semi-randomized, sham-controlled trial. Inhibitory continuous Theta Burst Stimulation (cTBS) was delivered on the affected hemisphere, in order to improve the response to the following robot-assisted therapy via a homeostatic increase of learning capacity. Twenty severe upper limb-impaired chronic stroke patients were randomized to robot-assisted therapy associated with real or sham cTBS, delivered for 10 working days. Eight real and nine sham patients completed the study. Change in Fugl-Meyer was chosen as primary outcome, while changes in several quantitative indicators of motor performance extracted by the robot as secondary outcomes. The treatment was well-tolerated by the patients and there were no adverse events. All patients achieved a small, but significant, Fugl-Meyer improvement (about 5%). The difference between the real and the sham cTBS groups was not significant. Among several secondary end points, only the Success Rate (percentage of targets reached by the patient) improved more in the real than in the sham cTBS group. This study shows that a short intensive robot-assisted rehabilitation produces a slight improvement in severe upper-limb impaired, even years after the stroke. The association with homeostatic metaplasticity-promoting non-invasive brain stimulation does not augment the clinical gain in patients with severe stroke.

Introduction

Severe upper limb impairment in chronic stroke patients does not respond to standard rehabilitation strategies; for this reason there is the need of new treatments that might be effective in patients with drastically limited residual movement capacity. In patients with moderate to severe upper-limb impairment, a slight improvement have been reported using robot-assisted rehabilitative treatment, even years after a stroke (Lo et al., 2010). Another innovative approach for the enhancement of motor recovery is represented by non-invasive human brain stimulation techniques, such as repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). These techniques can induce long-lasting changes in the excitability of central motor circuits via long-term potentiation/depression (LTP/LTD)-like phenomena (Di Pino et al., 2014b). A recent study reported a mild motor improvement after 10 sessions of rTMS in a group of severe chronic stroke patients (Demirtas-Tatlidedea et al., 2015).

Aim of present study was to explore whether the combination of these two approaches might enhance their positive effects on motor recovery. To the end of assessing safety and potential efficacy of the combination of robot-assisted rehabilitation and non-invasive brain stimulation in a group of chronic stroke patients with severe upper limb impairment, we designed a proof-of-principle double blinded semi-randomized sham-controlled trial. We used continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS), a robust form of inhibitory rTMS inducing LTD-like changes lasting for about 1 h [8]. The choice of employing cTBS on the affected hemisphere was based on the findings of our recent study, which suggested that this inhibitory protocol can improve the response to physical therapy (Di Lazzaro et al., 2013). Moreover, rTMS protocols suppressing cortical excitability have been shown to strongly facilitate motor learning in normal subjects (Jung and Ziemann, 2009). Jung and Ziemann suggested that such enhancement might involve the phenomenon of “homeostatic” plasticity, which can be induced in the human brain using a variety of brain stimulation protocols (Karabanov et al., 2015). Considering the close link between LTP and mammalian learning and memory (Malenka and Bear, 2004), an enhancement of learning after LTD induction might appear a paradox. However, the experimental studies by Rioult-Pedotti et al. demonstrated the existence of a homeostatic balance between learning and the induction of LTP/LTD (Rioult-Pedotti et al., 2000), thus showing that the ease of producing synaptic LTP/LTD depends on the prior history of neural activity. In the context of stroke, this predicts that by delivering a rTMS protocol that induces LTD-like effects on the stroke-affected hemisphere before performing rehabilitation, would luckily result in better relearning (Di Pino et al., 2014a).