Rehabilitation of motor function after stroke: a multiple systematic review focused on techniques to stimulate upper extremity recovery

After looking at 5712 publications they still refuse to write up a stroke protocol. What do we have to do to get protocols written up? Does every single person in stroke leadership need to have a stroke to personally experience how fucking bad stroke rehab is? Would that finally get a strategy going?
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00442/abstract

Samar M. Hatem^{1, 2, 5*}, Geoffroy Saussez², Margaux della Faille², Vincent Prist⁶, Xue Zhang³, Delphine Dispa^{2, 4} and Yannick Bleyenheuft²

• ¹Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine, Brugmann University Hospital, Belgium
• ²Institute of Neuroscience, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
• ³Department of Kinesiology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
• ⁴Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine, Cliniques universitaires St-Luc, Belgium
• ⁵Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy, Faculty of Physical Education and Physiotherapy, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
• ⁶Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine, Centre Hospitalier de l’Ardenne, Belgium

Stroke is one of the leading causes for disability worldwide. Motor function deficits due to stroke affect the patients’ mobility, their limitation in daily life activities, their participation in society and their odds of returning to professional activities. All of these factors contribute to a low overall quality of life.
Rehabilitation training is the most effective way to reduce motor impairments in stroke patients. This multiple systematic review focuses both on standard treatment methods and on innovating rehabilitation techniques used to promote upper extremity motor function in stroke patients. A total number of 5712 publications on stroke rehabilitation was systematically reviewed for relevance and quality with regards to upper extremity motor outcome. This procedure yielded 270 publications corresponding to the inclusion criteria of the systematic review. Recent technology-based interventions in stroke rehabilitation including non-invasive brain stimulation, robot-assisted training and virtual reality immersion are addressed. Finally, a decisional tree based on evidence from the literature and characteristics of stroke patients is proposed.(Who gives a shit about a decision tree? Fucking worthless crap. We are continually screwed from the incompetence of the stroke medical world)
At present, the stroke rehabilitation field faces the challenge to tailor evidence-based treatment strategies to the needs of the individual stroke patient. Interventions can be combined in order to achieve the maximal motor function recovery for each patient. Though the efficacy of some interventions may be under debate, motor skill learning and some new technological approaches give promising outcome prognosis in stroke motor rehabilitation.

Keywords: Rehabilitation, Upper Extremity, Stroke, review, Paresis, Systematic review
Citation: Hatem SM, Saussez G, della Faille M, Prist V, Zhang X, Dispa D and Bleyenheuft Y (2016). Rehabilitation of motor function after stroke: a multiple systematic review focused on techniques to stimulate upper extremity recovery. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 10:442. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2016.00442

Received: 13 Jul 2016; Accepted: 18 Aug 2016.

Edited by:
Bernard Dan, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

Reviewed by:
Veena A. Nair, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Sahil Bajaj, University of Arizona, USA  

Copyright: © 2016 Hatem, Saussez, della Faille, Prist, Zhang, Dispa and Bleyenheuft. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Prof. Samar M. Hatem, Brugmann University Hospital, Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine, Brussels, Belgium, samar.hatem@chu-brugmann.be