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.

Saturday, April 29, 2023

Quantifying Nonuse in Chronic Stroke Patients: A Study Into Paretic, Nonparetic, and Bimanual Upper-Limb Use in Daily Life

Damn it all, it is NOT learned nonuse. It is the actual inability to use it because of dead neurons. Quit blaming the patient for not recovering and blame the doctor and therapists for knowing nothing on how to get survivors recovered! 

Do you blithering idiots ever actually think about why stroke patients don't recover?

Quantifying Nonuse in Chronic Stroke Patients: A Study Into Paretic, Nonparetic, and Bimanual Upper-Limb Use in Daily Life

Marian E. Michielsen, MSc

 , Ruud W. Selles, PhD, Henk J. Stam, MD, PhD Gerard M. Ribbers, MD, PhD, Johannes B. Bussmann, PhD
ABSTRACT. Michielsen ME, Selles RW, Stam HJ, RibbersGM, Bussmann JB.  Arch Phys Med Rehabil 2012;xx:xxx.
Objective:
 To quantify uni- and bimanual upper-limb use inpatients with chronic stroke in daily life compared with healthy controls.
Design:
 Cross-sectional observational study.
Setting:
 Outpatient rehabilitation center.
Participants:
 Patients with chronic stroke (n

38) and healthycontrols (n

18).
Intervention:
 Not applicable.
Main Outcome Measures:
 Upper-limb use in daily life was measured with an accelerometry-based upper-limb activity monitor, an accelerometer based measurement device. Uni-manual use of the paretic and the nonparetic side and bimanual upper-limb use were measured for a period of 24 hours. Outcomes were expressed in terms of both duration and intensity.
Results:
 Patients used their unaffected limb much more than their affected limb (5.3h vs 2.4h), while controls used both limbs a more equal amount of time (5.4h vs 5.1h). Patients used their paretic side less than controls used their nondominant side and their nonparetic side more than controls their dominant side. The intensity with which patients used their paretic side was lower than that with which controls used their nondominant side, while that of the nonparetic side was higher than that of the dominant side of controls. Finally, patients used their paretic side almost exclusively in bimanual activities. During bimanual activities, the intensity with which they used their affected side was much lower than that of the nonaffected side.
Conclusion:
 Our data show considerable nonuse of the paretic side, both in duration and in intensity, and both during unimanual and bimanual activities in patients with chronicstroke. Patients do compensate for this with increased use of the nonparetic side.
Key Words:
 Ambulatory monitoring; Motor activity; Reha-bilitation; Stroke; Upper extremity.©
 2012 by the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine
F
IFTY TO 70% OF PATIENTS with stroke suffer fromlong-term motor deficits of the upper limb,
1
with a de-creased use of the paretic upper extremity in daily life.
2
Be-cause this latter may have a great impact on the manner inwhich a patient is able to participate in daily life activities,maximizing purposeful use of the upper extremity in daily lifeis a key factor in motor rehabilitation following stroke.While it is clear that a decreased motor capacity of theparetic arm influences the use of both extremities, the exactchanges in upper-limb use following stroke are not yet fullyunderstood. Regarding the paretic upper extremity, many studies have shown that there is no 1-on-1 relation between motor impairment and functional use.
3,4
This may be related to the phenomenon of learned nonuse,
5
which describes how patients will have “learned” not to use the paretic side to its fullcapacity.
6
Brain injury causes structural damage to motor path-ways as well as depression of neural excitability near thelesion. Decreasing activity of the upper extremity leads to afurther reduction in excitability and as such starts a viciouscircle of decreasing excitability and decreasing activity.
7
Even less is known about the consequences of stroke on thenonparetic side. Motor performance of the nonparetic side maybe impaired compared with that in healthy subjects, showing,for instance, decreased speed and consistency of performance.
8
In addition, it has been shown that patients with acute strokehave a more reduced use of the nonparetic side in daily life thando healthy subjects.
9
On the other hand, it is generally assumedthat poststroke the nonparetic side will be used more to com-pensate for the decreased use of the paretic side. However, toour knowledge, this has not been investigated in patients withchronic stroke.Overall many questions on techniques to optimize the func-tion of the paretic extremity after stroke still need to be an-swered. The optimal rehabilitation technique is still not de-fined, and different approaches in reducing upper-extremityparesis are distinguished.
7
Several therapies have been devel-oped to improve the use of the nonparetic arm in daily life. Forexample, constraint-induced movement therapy (CIMT),
10,11
or forced use,
12
reported as a beneficial treatment option formotor recovery of the arm,
13
prevents the use of the nonpareticupper limb and aims to counterbalance the learned nonuse.CIMT is an augmentative technique,
7
a high-intensity, uni-manual training aiming to counterbalance the vicious circle of decreasing excitability and decreasing activity. Furthermore,CIMT has aspects of task-specific exercising. Bilateral trainingprograms have also been developed, for example, with rhythmic
 auditory cueing.
14
To evaluate and understand the effects of upper-extremity training in daily life conditions, detailed insight isneeded in unimanual and bimanual function of the arms in dailylife conditions. This is the topic of the current article.Several studies have included the measurement of upper-limb use in daily life. For example, Taub,
11
Mark,
15
and Wolf
5
and colleagues used the Motor Activity Log (MAL) in their studies. However, although validated against an objective mea-sure,
16
the MAL still is a subjective instrument that focuses on how well and how much patients use their most impaired arm in a defined category of activities, and the MAL does not include data on the amount of use of the non impaired arm and bilateral use. Another method for assessing upper-limb use in a home setting is provided by accelerometers and other portable devices providing the opportunity to assess how much patients with stroke use their upper limbs in daily life for longer periods.
2
However, so far, studies using these devices assessed only the upper-limb use overall and not in detail. For example,many studies express actual upper-limb use only as a ratio between the use of the affected and the use of the unaffected side,
17
thus omitting information about usage times of the paretic side and the nonparetic side separately. Second, currentdevices do not differentiate between arm movements resulting from general body movements such as walking and arm movements during sitting and standing. Third, most measurement devices cannot differentiate between the duration of use and the intensity of use, and finally, most devices cannot or do not differentiate between unilateral and bilateral usage of the arms.The aim of the present study was to quantify uni- and bimanual upper-limb use in patients with chronic stroke in daily life and compare this with healthy controls. By using an accelerometry based upper-limb activity monitor,
18
we were able to give an insight into both duration and intensity of upper-limb use and to discriminate between upper-limb movements caused by whole-body movements and movements independent of whole-body movements, thus providing an insight into the amount of functional and purposeful upper-limb use in daily life conditions.

More at link.

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