Dados do Trabalho

Título

Treatment of Upper Limb Paresis With Repetitive Peripheral Nerve Sensory Stimulation and Motor Training: one month post-treatment follow-up

Resumo

Background: In a randomized, placebo-controlled, proof-of-principle clinical trial, active or sham repetitive peripheral sensory stimulation (RPSS) were delivered as add-on interventions to task-specific training (TST) and functional electrical stimulation (FES) to 38 subjects with moderate to severe motor upper limb impairment in the chronic phase after stroke, three times per week, for six weeks. Increases in grasp and pinch force were significantly greater in the active than in the sham group. The per-protocol subgroup (25/38; 66%) only included patients who complied with at least 80% of the interventions. Outcomes were assessed in 19/25 (24%) of the per-protocol subgroup, one month post-treatment.
Objective: To investigate whether gains in pinch and grasp strength remained in subjects of the per-protocol subgroup, followed up to one month after the end of treatment.
Methods: Ten subjects were in the active and nine in the sham group. Within-group changes in performance (post-treatment versus 1 month later) were compared with the Wilcoxon test. Between-group differences in changes in performance were compared with the Mann-Whitney test.
Results: There were no statistically significant differences in characteristics or baseline performance between the two groups (Table 1). There were no significant within-group differences between performance after treatment and one month later (Table 2). There were no significant between-group differences in changes in performance after treatment, compared to one month later (grasp, p=0.447; pinch, p=0.094).
Conclusions: Gains in performance observed after treatment were retained at 1 month in the active and sham groups. These results should be interpreted with caution due to the limited power of this subgroup analysis.