Motor Imagery Ability in Patients With Traumatic Brain Injury

Abstract

Motor imagery ability in patients with traumatic brain injury Objective: To assess motor imagery (MI) ability in patients with a moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). Design: Prospective, behavioral study with matched control subjects Setting: Rehabilitation unit in a university hospital Participants: Patients with a TBI (mean coma duration 18 days) receiving rehabilitation (n=20) and healthy control subjects (n=17) matched for age and level of education Interventions: not applicable Main Outcome Measures: The vividness of MI using a revised version of the Movement Imagery Questionnaire (MIQ-RS), temporal features of MI using the Time Dependent Motor Imagery test (TDMI), the temporal congruence test, and a walking trajectory imagery test. A mental rotation test was used to measure MI accuracy. Results: The results of the MIQ-RS revealed a decrease of MI vividness in the TBI group. For the TDMI test, an increasing number of stepping movements was observed with increasing time periods in both groups. The TBI group performed a significantly smaller number of imagined movements in the same movement time. The temporal congruence test showed a significant correlation between imagined and actual stepping time in both groups. The walking trajectory test disclosed an increase of the imagined and actual walking time with increasing path length in both groups. The results of the hand mental rotation test indicated a significant effect of rotation angles on imagery movement times in both groups, but rotation time was significantly slower in the TBI group. Conclusions: Patients with a TBI demonstrated a preserved MI ability, although the results of the extensive clinical test battery indicated a significant decrease of MI vividness, temporal coupling and accuracy.

Functional Plasticity in the Absence of Structural Change

“…Thus, RS was not completely unable to perform mental rotation but rather did so with diminished effectiveness. Indeed, people with traumatic brain injury are able to perform mental imagery tasks such as the Hand Laterality Test, 27 but their reaction times are significantly longer than controls. It is difficult to compare performance of people with parietal lesions to those of other patients on this task because of lack of information on lesion location and severity in previous reports.…”

The Application of Motor Imagery to Neurorehabilitation

“…However, many people have difficulty in performing MI. Especially MI ability was significantly decreased in post-stroke patients [62]. They have no feedback about whether MI did perform correctly, because MI is a mental rehearsal of movement without any overt motor outputs [1].…”

A Program to Improve Reach Estimation and Reduce Fall Risk in the Elderly

“…Despite the literature being sparse in regard to the effectiveness of imagery training in the context of reach, studies using other actions are promising. For example, motor imagery has been documented as an effective training and therapy tool for recovery from brain injury [24] stroke [25,26], and other neuromotor impairments [27,28]. In healthy individuals, research findings are also supportive of the benefits of motor imagery training for planning actions [29,30,31,32].…”

“…Obviously, this should be viewed as an approximate benchmark with the progression principle strictly applied. These figures come from our review of published effective MI intervention programs [24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32].…”