Brain Disorders & Therapy

Recovery of arm/hand coordination and function for severely impaired, chronic stroke survivors

Global Summit on Stroke

August 03-05, 2015 Birmingham, UK

Janis J Daly

Posters-Accepted Abstracts: Brain Disord Ther

Abstract:

Treatment methods utilizing motor learning principles for the treatment of persistent upper limb dysfunction following
stroke have been reported in the literature. Most of these studies showed somewhat promising results but stroke survivors
did not recover normal function and reported gains were statistically significant but small and not clinically significant.
Others have shown that technology-based upper limb therapies such as robotics training or functional electrical stimulationcan
produce some positive results but results were not considered clinically significant. And many studies have focused on mildly
to moderately impaired stroke survivors but little is known about recovery of more severely impaired stroke survivors. We
developed and tested an intensive motor learning protocol for arm and hand coordination and functional training.Treatment
was provided 5 days/week for 60 sessions.Recently, we have shown that this intensive motor learning intervention alone or
with assistive technologies can produce highly clinically significant improvement in arm/hand coordination and functional
task performance.We showed that it was feasible to administer this intensive protocol using 1:3 ratio of therapist to patients
(three patients per group with one therapist) without compromising motor recovery. Finally, we showed that this intervention
significantly reduced upper limb spasticity and produced significant changes in task-related brain activations that were
associated with mitigation of spasticity.