Nexstim Announces New Stroke Therapy Produced Significant Gains in Motor Function Post-Stroke

And once again rehabilitation departments(RIC this time) are not looking beyond their own silo. Damn, do they not have any understanding that if you stop the neuronal cascade of death you will have less dead and damaged neurons and thus your existing protocols will work much better. I'm working on a letter to the president of the RIC laying out all their failures.
http://www.fortmilltimes.com/2014/02/14/3288083/nexstim-announces-new-stroke-therapy.html
Every two seconds someone in the world suffers a stroke. A study from the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago approached stroke rehabilitation through a new combination of therapies which produced significantly greater gains in patients’ motor function 6 months post-stroke. The combination of non-invasive navigated transcranial stimulation (nTMS) along with occupational therapy (OT) opened the door to improving the quality of life for stroke survivors. The study presented Thursday at the American Heart Association (AHA) and the American Stroke Association’s (ASA) International Stroke Conference, yielded results from the active group of improved function by 13+ points in UEFM score.
“The results obtained in the Contrastim trial provide evidence that non-invasive neurostimulation has major potential for improving motor function in stroke sufferers.” – Jarmo Laine, MD, Nexstim VP of Medical Affairs
The Study
Dr. Richard Harvey and his team at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) presented their research (presentation #152) which looked at the combination of non-invasive nTMS along with OT in post-stroke patients.
“It helped me greatly. It’s just immeasurable the progress that I have made.” – Dwayne Nelson, stroke trial patient
Treatment consisted of 20 minutes of pre-functional OT, 17 minutes of nTMS, followed by 60 minutes of upper limb task-oriented OT. Patients received treatment during 3 visits per week, for 6 weeks, as the standard of care in the US. They then returned for follow-up visits at 1 week, 1 month, and 6 months. The study found that Nexstim’s non-invasive Navigated Brain Stimulation (NBS) System used as an adjunct to therapy promoted lasting improvements in patients’ motor function compared to the sham group.
“What we found is that there are areas of the brain, usually where the lesion is, that are less active than they used to be, and that there are actually areas on the brain on the opposite hemisphere, the healthy side of the brain, that are more active than they used to be.” – Lynn Rogers, PhD, Director, Neuralplasticity Laboratory, RIC

More about the technology at the link.