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Friday, June 25, 2004In their study, Luft's team had 20 long-term stroke survivors engage in six weeks of either standard physiotherapy -- in which physiotherapists passively move the patient's trunk, shoulder, arms and hand -- or BATRAC. In BATRAC, patients push or pull a T-bar in rhythmic time with a metronome for four, 5-minute periods per day. All of the study participants had suffered a stroke between 10 months and 39 years prior to the therapy, for an overall average of 9 years. According to the researchers, six of the eight patients in the BATRAC group gained improvements in arm function, while no such improvement was seen in the 12 patients taking regular physiotherapy. Using sophisticated MRI techniques, the researchers also detected what they called 'reorganization of central motor networks' in the brains of those patients whose arms improved after BATRAC, according to Luft. This type of brain reorganization was not seen in patients taking normal physiotherapy, they added. That sounds promising. There is, as always, a caveat. The research was presented at a conference, so it's impossible to tell how significant the improvement in function was. Or if the patients thought it was worth the work. posted by Sydney on 6/25/2004 09:20:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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