A program of balance training can improve PI in patients with PD.

Limb apraxia (LA), is a neuropsychological syndrome characterized by difficulty in performing gestures and may therefore be an ideal model for investigating whether action execution deficits are causatively linked to deficits in action understanding. We tested 33 left brain-damaged patients and 8 right brain-damaged patients for the presence of the LA. Importantly, we also tested all the patients in an ad hoc developed gesture recognition task wherein an actor performs, either correctly or incorrectly, transitive (using objects) or intransitive (without objects) meaningful conventional limb gestures. Patients were instructed to judge whether the observed gesture was correct or incorrect. Lesion analysis enabled us to evaluate the relationship between specific brain regions and behavioral performance in gesture execution and gesture comprehension. We found that LA was present in 21 left brain-damaged patients and it was linked to frontal and parietal lesions. Moreover, we found that recognition of correct execution of familiar gestures performed by others was more impaired in patients with LA than in nonapraxic patients. Crucially, the gesture comprehension deficit correlated with damage to the opercular and triangularis portions of the inferior frontal gyrus, two regions that are involved in complex aspects of action-related processing. In contrast, no such relationship was observed with lesions centered on the inferior parietal cortex. The present findings suggest that lesions to left frontal regions that are involved in planning and performing actions are causatively associated with deficits in the recognition of the correct execution of meaningful gestures.

We randomly assigned 33 patients with left hemisphere stroke, limb apraxia, and aphasia to an apraxia or a control (aphasia) treatment group. Before and after each treatment, patients underwent a comprehensive neuropsychological testing battery and a caregiver evaluation of patient's activities of daily life (ADL) independence. Apraxia severity was related with ADL independence. Control (aphasia) treatment improved patients' language and intelligence performance. Apraxia treatment specifically improved praxic function and ADL.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the short, medium and long-term effects of peripheral repetitive magnetic stimulation (rMS) on myofascial pain compared with transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS).Fifty-three subjects with myofascial trigger points (TPs) at the level of the superior trapezius muscle were allocated randomly to three groups. The first group (n=17) was treated with rMS, the second (n=18) with TENS and the third (n=18) received a placebo treatment. Each treatment consisted of ten daily 20-minute sessions. Patients were evaluated before and immediately following treatment, and at one and three months after the end of treatment. Outcome measures were: the "neck pain and disability visual analogue scale" (NPDVAS), an algometric evaluation of pain, an evaluation of the TP characteristics, and the range of cervical bending and rotation contralateral to the affected trapezius muscle. At the end of treatment, the rMS group showed a significant improvement in the NPDVAS, algometry, TP characteristics, and cervical contralateral rotation. This improvement also persisted at one and three months post-therapy. After treatment, the TENS group showed significant improvement in the same outcome measures except for algometry. At the one month follow-up visit, this improvement had returned to non significant levels in all outcome measures with the exception of NPDVAS. No significant effect of TENS was seen at the three-month follow-up visit. The placebo group showed no significant improvement in any measure. Our results strongly suggest that at medium and longer term intervals peripheral rMS may be more effective than TENS for the treatment of myofascial pain.

No abstract