Original articleInfluence of Electric Somatosensory Stimulation on Paretic-Hand Function in Chronic Stroke
Section snippets
Participants
Nine patients, an average of 64.5±4.4 years old (4 women; all right-hand dominant), with history of a single ischemic cerebral infarct (6 subcortical, 1 cortico-subcortical, 2 cortical) (table 1,fig 1) equal to or more than 1.5 years (6.5±1y; range, 1.5–13.3y) before testing participated in the study. All had initially severe motor paresis (below Medical Research Council [MRC] scale grade 2) as described in the patients’ chart and subsequently recovered to MRC grade 3.5 to 4.9 and Fugl-Meyer
Results
The familiarization period resulted in progressive performance improvements in the paretic hand expressed as reductions in JTHFT time (for raw and normalized data, P<.05; see figs 2B, 2C). JTHFT time at the end of the familiarization period was comparable to baseline JTHFT determinations (taken from the average of 3 repetitions before each intervention) in the 3 testing sessions.
Repeated-measures ANOVA showed significant effects of intervention and intervention by time interaction on JTHFT time
Discussion
The main result of this study was that a single 2-hour application of electric somatosensory stimulation of the paretic hand in patients with chronic stroke led to improvement in performance of a functional hand motor test relative to stimulation of the paretic leg and to no stimulation.
Hand motor deficits play an important role in stroke disability.29 Previous reports showed that application of electric somatosensory stimulation in patients with chronic stroke over weeks to months led to
Conclusions
Somatosensory stimulation applied to a paretic limb can benefit performance of a functional test in patients with chronic stroke, supporting the proposal that in combination with training protocols electric somatosensory stimulation may enhance the benefit of customary neurorehabilitative interventions and possibly motor learning.
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Published as an abstract of the Fifth World Stroke Congress, June 2004, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
No commercial party having a direct financial interest in the results of the research supporting this article has or will confer a benefit upon the author(s) or upon any organization with which the author(s) is/are associated.