Deans' stroke musings: The Effects of Bilateral Arm Training on Motor Control and Functional Performance in Chronic Stroke: A Randomized Controlled Study

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.

Tuesday, June 22, 2021

The Effects of Bilateral Arm Training on Motor Control and Functional Performance in Chronic Stroke: A Randomized Controlled Study

Since this is for chronic you are on your own to figure out how to do bilateral arm training. Nothing here remotely resembles a protocol.

The Effects of Bilateral Arm Training on Motor Control and Functional Performance in Chronic Stroke: A Randomized Controlled Study

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Keh-chung Lin, ScD, Yi-an Chen, MS, Chia-ling Chen, MD, PhD, , , , ...

First Published September 3, 2009 Research Article Find in PubMed

Abstract

Background.

Most studies of bilateral arm training (BAT) did not employ a randomized controlled trial design and involved very limited functional training tasks.

Objective

Compare the effects of BAT with control intervention (CI) on motor control and motor performance of the upper extremity and also functional gains in patients with chronic stroke.

Methods.

This 2-group randomized controlled trial with pretreatment and posttreatment measures enrolled 33 stroke patients (mean age = 53.85 years) 6 to 67 months after onset of a first stroke. They received either a BAT program concentrating on both upper extremities moving simultaneously in functional tasks by symmetric patterns or CI (control treatment) for 2 hours on weekdays for 3 weeks. Outcome measures included kinematic analyses assessing motor control strategies for unilateral and bimanual reaching and clinical measures involving the Fugl-Meyer Assessment (FMA) of motor-impairment severity and the Functional Independence Measure (FIM) and the Motor Activity Log (MAL) evaluating functional ability.

Results. After treatment, the BAT group showed better temporal and spatial efficiency during unilateral and bilateral tasks and less online error correction only during the bilateral task than the control group. The BAT group showed a significantly greater improvement in the FMA than the control group but not in the FIM and MAL.

Conclusions.

Relative to CI, BAT improved the spatiotemporal control of the affected arm in both bilateral and unilateral tasks, decreased online corrections to perform bilateral tasks, and reduced motor impairment. These findings support the use of BAT to improve motor control and motor function of the affected upper limb in stroke patients.