Motor imagery ability: recovery of moto imagery ability in stroke patients.

Ruis, H.C. (2008) Motor imagery ability: recovery of moto imagery ability in stroke patients. thesis, Human Movement Sciences.

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Abstract

Objective: Different studies showed that it is important to assess the motor imagery ability of patients before the rehabilitation program starts. The purpose of this research was (1) to measure the motor imagery ability of hemiplegic stroke patients 3 weeks post-stroke, 6 weeks post-stroke and 4 months post-stroke and find out whether the motor imagery ability recovers naturally and (2) to find out whether the motor imagery ability improves in parallel with arm-hand function in 4 months. Methods: We studied 12 people who had experienced frrst unilateral stroke just 3 weeks prior to participation. Each patient is measured at three times in their rehabilitation progress. An age matched control group {N=lO) was included in the study to control whether the dominance of the hand will influence the reaction time and accuracy in the Parsons task. The motor imagery ability was evaluated using two tasks: The Parsons task and an explicit motor imagery ability measurement test. The arm-hand function was evaluated using two tasks: the Utrechtse Arm-Hand task (UAT) and the Brunnstrom Fugl-Meyer Scale (BFM). Results: The control group performed significantly better in the Parsons task than the patients did. The patient group progressed on both the letter task and the hand task, both in terms of number of correct answers and reaction time. Also, the patients showed progress at the BFM and the UAT. We compared these scores with the scores in the Parsons task. The results showed that no relation existed between the scores in the Parsons task and the BFM and UAT. Conclusion: We can conclude that patients indeed progress in three weeks on their motor imagery ability and visual imagery ability. This progression may be due to an improved cognition. The expectation is that visual and motor imagery is cascaded over a period of four months. The patients who executed stage 3 showed a trend for this expectation. We can conclude that the recovery of impairments and disabilities of the upper limb occurred in the first weeks after stroke onset. Finally, the results showed that the recovery of the motor imagery ability did not improve in parallel with the arm-hand function.

Item Type:	Thesis (Thesis)
Supervisor name:	Vries, Drs. S.J. de and Otten, Prof. Dr. E. and Tepper, Drs. M.
Faculty:	Medical Sciences
Date Deposited:	25 Jun 2020 11:04
Last Modified:	25 Jun 2020 11:04
URI:	https://umcg.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/2446

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