Original title: Principles of Neurorehabilitation After Stroke Based on Motor Learning and Brain Plasticity Mechanisms
After a stroke, rehabilitation can teach people ways to work around movement problems, but that may not reduce the problems themselves. This paper brings together research on how people learn movements and how the brain changes with experience. It sets out 15 principles for practice, including repeating useful tasks, changing their difficulty, and giving feedback. The authors discuss trials and other evidence that used these principles.
When you practice making a meal, repeating the same steps can help, but so can changing the task and getting feedback on what went wrong. The challenge is choosing practice that builds the skill, rather than just finding a shortcut that gets dinner on the table. In this paper, practice choices such as repetition, changing difficulty, and feedback are ways rehabilitation can support relearning movement after a stroke.
For people recovering from stroke, some therapies teach ways to manage daily life without improving the movement that was lost. This paper connects brain and learning research to practical rehabilitation principles that may support longer-term recovery and quality of life.
The abstract presents a synthesis of principles and discusses evidence from trials, healthy individuals, and clinical work. It does not specify how strong the evidence is for each principle, which approaches work best for particular patients, or whether the principles have been tested together as one treatment.
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Principles of Neurorehabilitation After Stroke Based on Motor Learning and Brain Plasticity Mechanisms — Martina Maier, Belén Rubio Ballester, Paul F. M. J. Verschure — Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience — doi:10.3389/fnsys.2019.00074
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.