New research suggest "prism adaptation" therapy could be used to treat the effects of a stroke such as spatial neglect.
Spatial neglect, an under-recognized but disabling disorder, often complicates recovery from right brain stroke," Doctor A.M. Barrett, director of Stroke Rehabilitation Research at the Kessler Foundation and chief of Neurorehabilitation Program Innovation at Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation, said in a Kessler news release. "Our study suggests we need to know what kind of neglect patients have in order to assign treatment."
Spatial neglect is "involves the inability to report, respond, or orient to stimuli, generally in the contralesional space," MedScape reported.
The research team classified patients by their spatial neglect profile, meaning "by Where (perceptional-intentional) versus Aiming (motor-intentional) symptoms, would predict response to prism adaptation therapy," the news release reported.
The team believed that those with Aiming bias would have a higher success rate in prism adaptation therapy than those with Where bias.
The research team looked at 24 patients who had suffered a right brain stroke and had been treated with a minimum of two weeks of prism adaptation treatment.
Over the course of six weeks the patients underwent Behavioral Inattention Test and Catherine Bergego Scale (CBS) testing, which looks at spatial neglect.
The team found that only those who had Aiming deficits showed an improvement over the course of the study. Those struggling with primarily Where deficits did not improve through the prism adaptation treatment. Study subjects that fell into both classifications showed "moderate" improvement.
"These findings suggest that patients with spatial neglect and Aiming deficits may benefit the most from early intervention with prism adaptataion therapy," Barrett said. "More broadly, classifying spatial deficits using modality-specific measures should be an important consideration of any stroke trial intending to obtain the most valid, applicable, and valuable results for recovery after right brain stroke."
