Abstract
Objective. To investigate whether motor imagery ability recovers in stroke patients and to see what the relationship is between different types of imagery and motor functioning after stroke. Methods. 12 unilateral stroke patients were measured at 3 and 6 weeks poststroke on 3 mental imagery tasks. Arm-hand function was evaluated using the Utrecht Arm-Hand task and the Brunnström Fugl-Meyer Scale. Age-matched healthy individuals (N = 10) were included as controls. Results. Implicit motor imagery ability and visual motor imagery ability improved significantly at 6 weeks compared to 3 weeks poststroke. Conclusion. Our study shows that motor imagery can recover in the first weeks after stroke. This indicates that a group of patients who might not be initially selected for mental practice can, still later in the rehabilitation process, participate in mental practice programs. Moreover, our study shows that mental imagery modalities can be differently affected in individual patients and over time.
Highlights
Several researchers have proposed the use of mental practice to facilitate motor recovery in stroke patients and other patients with motor disorders [1, 2]
The Mann-Whitney U Test showed that the patients had a significantly lower implicit motor imagery accuracy score controls (U = 16.5, P = .003)
Previous research has suggested that motor imagery capacity could diminish with time poststroke, that is, patients more a year poststroke were less accurate on motor imagery tasks than patients a few weeks after stroke [28, 29]
Summary
Several researchers have proposed the use of mental practice to facilitate motor recovery in stroke patients and other patients with motor disorders [1, 2]. Mental practice is a training method where imagination of movements, without moving, is used with the intention of improving motor performance. Several lines of research have shown that mental practice improves motor performance in healthy participants [4, 5] as well as in stroke patients [6,7,8,9]. Studies with healthy individuals have shown that motor imagery and actual action share some striking similarities. Neuroimaging studies have shown that during motor imagery the same brain areas are active as during actual movement [13,14,15,16,17]. In stroke patients there should be a relation between motor function and motor imagery ability. The reported results far are not consistent [18]
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