Deans' stroke musings: UCF professor explores motor imagery therapy for post-stroke patients

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.

Thursday, February 22, 2024

UCF professor explores motor imagery therapy for post-stroke patients

Motor imagery has been out there a long time, just maybe not for apraxia. Hopefully your competent? doctor has EXACT STROKE PROTOCOLS for recovering motor movement using motor imagery. No protocols, you don't have a functioning stroke doctor or hospital! RUN AWAY!

motor imagery (78 posts to January 2013)

UCF professor explores motor imagery therapy for post-stroke patients

Developed by UCF associate professor Lauren Bislick, MI-TEE, or Motor Imagery for Treatment Enhancement and Efficacy, incorporates motor imagery practices to prime neural networks that direct muscles to complete sounds or words.

Courtesy of Unsplash

A UCF professor received a $570,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to explore alternative treatments for post-stroke survivors.

Some post-stroke patients suffer from a condition called apraxia of speech, or AOS. This motor planning disorder can impair an individual’s brain from directing muscle movement to form speech correctly, according to the Speech and Hearing Sciences at the University of Washington.

Dr. Lauren Bislick, assistant professor at the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, is exploring more accessible and cost-friendly alternatives to traditional AOS treatment methods by implementing at-home practice protocol using motor imagery, according to UCF Today.

Bislick said there are barriers surrounding access to traditional treatment plans for post-stroke patients, especially with financial and insurance issues.

“Unfortunately, in outpatient therapy, when it is covered, people only get like 12 sessions a year,” Bislick said. “That's great if you're working on rehabilitation of a broken limb, but when you're trying to rebuild a neural network within the brain, you need a lot of practice.”

Bislick said that AOS is an evidence-based treatment. In order for it to be effective, she plans to incorporate an at-home practice protocol primarily focused on motor imagery called MI-TEE, which stands for Motor Imagery for Treatment Enhancement and Efficacy.

“Motor imagery is the act of visualizing yourself successfully completing a motor act or some type of movement,” Bislick said. “Motor imagery has proven to be extremely effective for training athletes. It's been effective for training rehabilitation after stroke or other types of injury when it comes to physical impairments, but has never been examined in apraxia of speech or in speech itself.”

Bislick said there isn’t much research available surrounding motor imagery practices for AOS, and the research in physical rehabilitation shows that motor imagery activates areas of the brain responsible for completing an act.

By watching specific stimuli set through an online platform, Bislick said patients will visualize completing an accurate production of a sound or word to practice outside of in-person sessions and further their recovery.

“All we're having them do is go through these identified stimuli that they are trained on in one-on-one practice, but then to go home and really just use motor imagery to kind of prime those networks in the brain,” Bislick said. “The hope and the hypothesis is that then that's going to set them up to perform even better and get more out of their next in person session.”

Professor and quantitative statistician Dr. Debbie Hahs-Vaughn said an expert will analyze MI-TEE’s data from both a qualitative and quantitative perspective.

“My role in working on the data is to interpret what we find in terms of the statistical analysis, and then working to help people outside of statistics and outside of the project understand what those results mean,” Hahs-Vaughn said.

Bislick said that while the project is in its early stages of development and research with only two participants so far, she hopes that MI-TEE will come to fruition and become a tool for patients in therapy.

“What I am hoping is that this truly helps to bolster their response to treatment and really give them bigger outcomes,” Bislick said. “At the end of the day, when they finish their therapy sessions for the year, they'll have made bigger gains in comparison to previous years before we had something like this.”