Contralateral hand anesthesia transiently improves poststroke sensory deficits.
OBJECTIVE
To test a possible strategy to alleviate somatosensory deficits after stroke.


METHODS
Here, we applied ischemic nerve block to the intact hand of patients with chronic stroke, which in healthy subjects elicits improvements in sensibility of the other hand.


RESULTS
We found that sensibility in the affected hand improved with intact hand anesthesia, but not with intact foot anesthesia or no anesthesia.


CONCLUSIONS
We conclude that reduction of sensory input from the intact hand leads to site-specific improvements in tactile discriminative skills in the affected hand after the period of anesthesia, a potentially relevant finding in designing neurorehabilitative interventions.
Voller
Bernhard
B
Human Cortical Physiology Section, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
Flöel
Agnes
A
Werhahn
Konrad J
KJ
Ravindran
Shashi
S
Wu
Carolyn W
CW
Cohen
Leonardo G
LG
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D000758:Anesthesia / Q000379:methods*; D004311:Double-Blind Method; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006225:Hand / Q000294:innervation* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D018737:Hand Strength; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time; D012678:Sensation Disorders / Q000209:etiology / Q000628:therapy*; D012684:Sensory Thresholds; D020521:Stroke / Q000150:complications; D013997:Time Factors