Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Brain Stimulation Aids Post-Stroke Arm Recovery

This is fascinating because it is applied to the non-injured hemisphere. What will it take for your doctor and hospital to  create this as a stroke protocol and implement in the hospital? 20 years or more? But I do wonder exactly what damage those patients it worked on had. Would it have worked on me where most of my pre-motor cortex is dead and half my motor cortex is dead?
http://www.medpagetoday.com/MeetingCoverage/ISCNeuroEdition/44347?
Magnetic brain stimulation added to hand and arm rehabilitation after a stroke nearly doubled the improvement in motor control, a pilot study showed.
Upper extremity Fugl-Meyer Score rose by nearly 15 points over 6 months after the 6-week rehab program with transcranial magnetic stimulation compared with an improvement of about seven points with the sham stimulation group (P=0.017).
Almost half achieved a clinically important difference of at least 4.5 points on that measure compared with about 30% in the sham group, Richard Harvey, MD, of Northwestern University and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, and colleagues found.
The difference was even more substantial when looking only at the roughly half of patients who didn't get further upper limb therapy after the first month of follow-up (20% versus 50%, P<0.001), the researchers reported here at the International Stroke Conference (ISC).

The stimulation involved 1 Hz pulses to the noninjured hemisphere, with the rationale that it would balance out cortical excitability.
"Recovery of motor function is associated with a return to balance in the two hemispheres," Harvey explained at the ISC session. "Balanced cortical excitability may be necessary for appropriate motor function."

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