Acute Stroke Intervention Clinical Trial
Official title:
Adding the Transcutaneous Electrical Nerves Stimulation for Acute Stroke Rehabilitation
The purpose of this study was to examine the outcomes of postural stability, activities of daily living function, and motor capacity of persons after stroke who received transcutaneous electrical nerves stimulation (TENS) or functional electrical stimulation (FES), in addition to SR, in the post-stroke acute phase. Such persons were compared with others who received SR alone in order to determine if the addition of TENS or FES resulted in earlier or more effective recovery.
Based on modern knowledge about the neuro-plastic changes that occur immediately after brain
injuries, rehabilitation should be more effective when started soon after brain damaged.
Besides, knowledge about one of the factors that determine efficacy of rehabilitation is the
commencement of treatment, as well as on the time interval from stroke to initiate voluntary
movement. Therefore, many studies had reported that the effectiveness of functional
electrical stimulation (FES) and transcutaneous electrical nerves stimulation (TENS), which
induce stimulation and the excitability, were widely applied in rehabilitation for patients
with stroke. However, many investigations about the effects of FES or TENS on motor recovery
for the stroke patients mainly focus on the chronic stage as well as compared each of two
different kinds of stimulation separately. Hence the investigators will study the impacts of
TENS and FES on the motor recovery for the stroke patients from the acute stage. Bedsides,
the investigators also study that whether patients after stroke in the acute stage who
received adding TENS experienced similar impacts on motor recovery to those who received
adding FES.
This was a single-blind randomized control trial study. The study recruited 40 subjects from
stroke center of National Taiwan Hospital (NTUH) within 3 days after first stroke onset. All
subjects were in stable medically control and assigned randomly to 1 of 3 groups including
(1)Functional electrical stimulation (FES) + standard rehabilitation (SR) ,(2) Transcutaneous
electrical nerves stimulation (TENS) + SR or (3)SR only (control group).The application of
FES and TENS was used for 30 minutes per day, 5 days per week for 2 weeks. The surface
electrodes of two dual channels were applied on tibialis anterior and quadriceps for FES and
TENS group. All groups received SR including neuro-facilitation and functional task training
etc.
Outcome measurements were analyzed with repeated measure analysis of variance using SPSS to
compare the main effects before, during, and after treatment, followed by post-hoc tests with
Bonferroni correction to compare treatment effects among the 3 groups. For categorical
variables, a X2 test was used. The significance level was set at 5% (2-tailed).
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