Deans' stroke musings: Estimating the Number of Latent Ranks of the Fugl-Meyer Assessment Score for the Affected Upper Extremity After 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.

Friday, May 16, 2025

Estimating the Number of Latent Ranks of the Fugl-Meyer Assessment Score for the Affected Upper Extremity After Stroke

I consider the Fugl-Meyer Assessment completely and totally worthless. NOTHING in that testing gets you recovered!

Using Fugl-Meyer for anything in stroke is the height of stupidity, nothing objective in it, so nothing is repeatable. This is totally against your stroke medical 'professionals' who will defend it and ignore that it does nothing for recovery.

Fugl-Meyer (110 posts to March 2011)

Estimating the Number of Latent Ranks of the Fugl-Meyer Assessment Score for the Affected Upper Extremity After Stroke

Kensuke Hara • Yuta Tauchi • Keisuke Hanada • Takashi Takebayashi

Published: May 16, 2025

DOI: 10.7759/cureus.84210

Peer-Reviewed

Cite this article as: Hara K, Tauchi Y, Hanada K, et al. (May 16, 2025) Estimating the Number of Latent Ranks of the Fugl-Meyer Assessment Score for the Affected Upper Extremity After Stroke. Cureus 17(5): e84210. doi:10.7759/cureus.84210

Abstract

Many clinical stroke rehabilitation studies have adopted the upper extremity motor section of the Fugl-Meyer Assessment (FMA-UE). In addition, some clinical studies use specific FMA-UE scores as inclusion criteria. However, it remains unclear whether it is appropriate to determine the criterion based on the total score of FMA-UE. This study aimed to determine a highly valid criterion using the latent rank theory (LRT) that can estimate the number of latent ranks of FMA-UE. This was a multicenter cross-sectional study; patients with stroke were recruited from 25 hospitals between March 2018 and April 2022. For all patients, FMA-UE results and participant information were collected. The collected FMA-UE data were divided into proximal and distal items and verified the dimensionality of the data. After that, the LRT was used to determine the latent ranks. Seven ranks were considered the most appropriate for proximal and distal items when estimating the number of latent ranks. These results suggest that FMA-UE has high construct validity. Furthermore, we recommend the novel interpretability of FMA-UE, which previous studies have yet to find. Although this cross-sectional study cannot directly guide stroke patients' recovery processes, it may be practical for optimizing the difficulty of stroke rehabilitation.