Deans' stroke musings: Robot-assisted and conventional therapies produce distinct rehabilitative trends in stroke survivors

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, November 11, 2016

Robot-assisted and conventional therapies produce distinct rehabilitative trends in stroke survivors

This really makes you wonder if our researchers have any clue what they are doing.
http://jneuroengrehab.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12984-016-0199-5#Abs1

Francisco J. Valero-CuevasEmail author,
Verena Klamroth-Marganska,
Carolee J. Winstein and
Robert Riener

Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation201613:92

DOI: 10.1186/s12984-016-0199-5

Received: 11 May 2016

Accepted: 1 October 2016

Published: 11 October 2016

Abstract

Background

Comparing the efficacy of alternative therapeutic strategies for the rehabilitation of motor function in chronically impaired individuals is often inconclusive. For example, a recent randomized clinical trial (RCT) compared robot-assisted vs. conventional therapy in 77 patients who had had chronic motor impairment after a cerebrovascular accident. While patients assigned to robotic therapy had greater improvements in the primary outcome measure (change in score on the upper extremity section of the Fugl-Meyer assessment), the absolute difference between therapies was small, which left the clinical relevance in question.

Methods

Here we revisit that study to test whether the multidimensional rehabilitative response of these patients can better distinguish between treatment outcomes. We used principal components analysis to find the correlation of changes across seven outcome measures between the start and end of 8 weeks of therapy. Permutation tests verified the robustness of the principal components found.

Results

Each therapy in fact produces different rehabilitative trends of recovery across the clinical, functional, and quality of life domains. A rehabilitative trend is a principal component that quantifies the correlations among changes in outcomes with each therapy.

Conclusions

These findings challenge the traditional emphasis of RCTs on using a single primary outcome measure to compare rehabilitative responses that are naturally multidimensional. This alternative approach to, and interpretation of, the results of RCTs may will lead to more effective therapies targeted for the multidimensional mechanisms of recovery.