Recovering Motor Function After Stroke
Stroke and Motor Learning
Strategies for Recovering Motor Function after Stroke
Strategies for Recovering Motor Function after Stroke
On an annual basis, close to a million U.S. citizens are hospitalized for stroke and their length of stay averages 5.3 days (NHLBI, 2013). Close to 60% of these are first time stroke patients. In terms of morbidity, stroke is responsible or 1.7 million Americans currently suffering from chronic physical and/or cognitive impairment. With nearly 80% of all stroke survivors suffering from limb impairment (reviewed by Thieme et al., 2012), there is a great need for remedial strategies that minimize the level of disability these patients suffer from. This report will review recent research in the area of upper limb rehabilitation strategies to better understand progress being made in this area of research.
Assessing Upper Limb Motor Impairment
As Higgins and colleagues (2011) discuss, there is a lack of standardization concerning functional evaluation of upper limbs following a stroke. To try and remedy this situation they developed an instrument designed to provide an accurate, score-based assessment of upper limb disability in stroke patients. The obvious advantages would be to create criteria that will allow doctors and researchers to establish baseline data and track the progress of rehabilitation efforts, and then directly compare patient data nationally and internationally.
Towards this goal, Higgins and colleagues (2011) collected assessment items from a number of different sources and combined them to create a prospective Stroke Arm Ladder. Some of the items included were how flexible arm and shoulder joints were, whether certain hand and arm manipulations could be demonstrated, and whether the patient could bathe and feed themselves or pick up a coin. The starting list contained 99 items and these were tested statistically...
Executive Function Performance Test (EFPT) for healthcare practitioners who deal with mild and moderate-severity stroke patients. Executive function is important to overall health because it allows us to regulate our actions, plan our behavior, and set goals. Stroke patients frequently suffer from executive-function related losses; this study proposes a measure that will help quantify the extent of executive function loss. The design of this study was a basic experimental 3x1
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