Abstract
In rehabilitation of patients with spinal cord injury (SCI), imagination of movement is a candidate tool to promote long-term recovery or to control futuristic neuroprostheses. However, little is known about the ability of patients with spinal cord injury to perform this task. It is likely that without the ability to effectively perform the movement, the imagination of movement is also problematic. We therefore examined, whether patients with SCI experience increased difficulties in motor imagery (MI) compared to healthy controls. We examined 7 male patients with traumatic spinal cord injury (aged 23–70 years, median 53) and 20 healthy controls (aged 21–54 years, median 30). All patients had incomplete SCI, with AIS (ASIA Impairment Scale) grades of C or D. All had cervical lesions, except one who had a thoracic injury level. Duration after injury ranged from 3 to 314 months. We performed the Movement Imagery Questionnaire Revised as well as the Beck Depression Inventory in all participants. The self-assessed ability of patients to visually imagine movements ranged from 7 to 36 (Md = 30) and tended to be decreased in comparison to healthy controls (ranged 16–49, Md = 42.5; W = 326.5, p = 0.055). Also, the self-assessed ability of patients to kinesthetically imagine movements (range = 7–35, Md = 31) differed significantly from the control group (range = 23–49, Md = 41; W = 337.5, p = 0.0047). Two patients yielded tendencies for depressive mood and they also reported most problems with movement imagination. Statistical analysis however did not confirm a general relationship between depressive mood and increased difficulty in MI across both groups. Patients with spinal cord injury seem to experience difficulties in imagining movements compared to healthy controls. This result might not only have implications for training and rehabilitation programs, but also for applications like brain-computer interfaces used to control neuroprostheses, which are often based on the brain signals exhibited during the imagination of movements.
Highlights
Motor imagery (MI) describes a variant of mental training that stands for the imagination of moving specific body parts (Schuster et al, 2011)
Within a study conducted at the Department of Neurology, Paracelsus Medical University Salzburg, Austria, we asked seven patients with cervical or thoracic spinal cord injuries to fill in the Movement Imagery Questionnaire Revised (MIQ-RS; Gregg et al, 2010)
VIS scores of patients were lower than those obtained of healthy participants, suggesting a trend for visual imagination of movements to be more difficult for patients with spinal cord injury (SCI)
Summary
Motor imagery (MI) describes a variant of mental training that stands for the imagination of moving specific body parts (Schuster et al, 2011) As such it has been shown in athletes to decrease anxiety and enhance self-confidence and to increase task performance (Martin et al, 1999; Munroe et al, 2000; Gregg et al, 2005). Imagined movements further seem to follow to some extent the same restrictions as executed movements, i.e., the pace of imagined movements is nearly the same as that of executed movements (Decety and Boisson, 1990; Decety and Jeannerod, 1996; Sirigu et al, 1996) These similarities lead to a general interest of using MI for several purposes such as training athletes in sports. Besides its beneficial role in sports training, MI has been studied in clinical settings
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