Effect of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Motor Recovery in Patients with Subacute Stroke

Abstract

Our results suggest a potentially beneficial effect of noninvasive cortical stimulation during rehabilitative motor training of patients who have suffered from subacute strokes.

Multiple sessions of transcranial direct current stimulation and upper extremity rehabilitation in stroke: A review and meta-analysis

“…Three studies did not describe the location of the strokes (Lindenberg et al, 2010;Wu et al, 2013;Viana et al, 2014). Four studies involved 65 (18%) participants with chronic stroke (Lindenberg et al, 2010;Bolognini et al, 2011;Nair et al, 2011;Viana et al, 2014), four studies involved 263 (71%) participants in the sub-acute stage (Kim et al, 2010;Hesse et al, 2011;Wu et al, 2013;Lee and Chun, 2014) and one study involved 40 (11%) people with acute stroke (Khedr et al, 2013). One hundred and forty-five (39%) participants had moderate UE impairments (Kim et al, 2010;Lindenberg et al, 2010;Bolognini et al, 2011;Nair et al, 2011;Lee and Chun, 2014;Viana et al, 2014) and 226 (61%) participants had severe UE impairments (Hesse et al, 2011;Khedr et al, 2013;Wu et al, 2013) at baseline based on the FMA or MRC Scale (shoulder) (Lum et al, 2002).…”

“…Eight studies used the FMA as an outcome measure of UE motor impairments (Kim et al, 2010;Lindenberg et al, 2010;Bolognini et al, 2011;Hesse et al, 2011;Nair et al, 2011;Wu et al, 2013;Lee and Chun, 2014;Viana et al, 2014) and one study used the Medical Research Council scale (Khedr et al, 2013). Only two studies explored the neurophysiological effects of tDCS, using measures of Resting and Active Motor Threshold (Khedr et al, 2013), motor evoked potential amplitude (Bolognini et al, 2011) and transcallosal inhibition to transcranial magnetic stimulation (Bolognini et al, 2011).…”

“…Two studies employed functional MRI of brain activity as an outcome measure (Lindenberg et al, 2010;Nair et al, 2011). The Barthel Index or Modified Barthel Index and Motor Activity Log were utilised as measures of activities of daily living (Kim et al, 2010;Hesse et al, 2011;Bolognini et al, 2011;Khedr et al, 2013;Wu et al, 2013;Lee and Chun, 2014).…”

“…Follow-up assessments varied between seven days (Lindenberg et al, 2010); 2 weeks (Bolognini et al, 2011); 4 weeks (Wu et al, 2013;Bolognini et al, 2011); 3 months (Hesse et al, 2011;Khedr et al, 2013); and 6 months (Kim et al, 2010) post-intervention. Three studies reported additional assessments: at 1 day (Kim et al, 2010); 3 days (Lindenberg et al, 2010); and 6 days (Nair et al, 2011) after the intervention was ended as a follow-up assessment.…”

“…Three studies randomised participants to anodal, cathodal and sham group (Kim et al, 2010;Hesse et al, 2011;Khedr et al, 2013); one study involved an anodal and sham group (Viana et al, 2014); two studies randomised participants to cathodal and sham group (Nair et al, 2011;Wu et al, 2013); one study had a cathodal group and no stimulation as a placebo (Lee and Chun, 2014); and two studies randomised to bihemispheric tDCS and sham groups (Lindenberg et al, 2010;Bolognini et al, 2011). The tDCS parameters deployed in the studies are displayed in Fig.…”