Deans' stroke musings: Step Length Asymmetry Predicts Rehabilitation Length in Subacute Post Stroke Patients

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.

Thursday, September 29, 2022

Step Length Asymmetry Predicts Rehabilitation Length in Subacute Post Stroke Patients

NO, NO, NO. We don't need this type of useless prediction. Create protocols that fix step length asymmetry.

I'd have you all fired for not understanding that the only goal in stroke research is getting survivors to 100% recovery. This does nothing for that.

Step Length Asymmetry Predicts Rehabilitation Length in Subacute Post Stroke Patients

Isabella Schwartz 1,2, Yonah Ofran 1,2 , Naama Karniel 2,3 , Martin Seyres 2 and Sigal Portnoy 3, *
1 Faculty of Medicine, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 9190501, Israel
2 Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, Hadassah Medical Center, Jerusalem 9765418, Israel
3 Department of Occupational Therapy, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University,
Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel
* Correspondence: portnoys@tauex.tau.ac.il

Abstract:

Background:

During the rehabilitation of individuals post stroke, evaluations are performed in order to discern the patient’s prognosis and optimize the treatment plan. However, these tests do not focus on gait symmetry, which might be a predictor for rehabilitation outcomes. We aimed to correlate gait symmetry measures of subacute post stroke patients with rehabilitation outcome and find the symmetry measure that best predicts the variability of the rehabilitation duration. A secondary aim was to compare these measures between patients with right and left brain lesions.
Methods:

We recruited 30 subacute post stroke patients (14 with right side lesion). We collected the following measures: National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS), Functional Independence Measure (FIM), the 10 m walk test (10MWT), Functional Ambulation Categories (FAC), spatial‐temporal gait measures, and gait symmetry and variability. Results: We found moderate correlations between the step length symmetry and the length of rehabilitation, NIHSS, FIM, FAC and 10MWT. The symmetry index of the step length predicted the length of the rehabilitation period as it explained 32.1% of its variance (p = 0.001). Discussion: We conclude that a simple test of the step length symmetry might be informative in predicting rehabilitation length in subacute post stroke patients.