Magnetic Therapy May Help Stroke Recovery

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Magnetic Therapy May Help Stroke Recovery
06.29.06, 12:00 AM ET

THURSDAY, June 29 (HealthDay News) -- Using powerful magnetic fields
to slow activity on the undamaged side of the brain after a stroke may
improve patients' motor function, a small study has found.

The technique, called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation
(rTMS), had beneficial effects lasting at least two weeks, according
to the report published Thursday in the journal Stroke.

"The results are certainly encouraging, but what the clinical
implications are at this point is really unclear," said Dr. Larry
Goldstein, director of the stroke center at Duke University in Durham,
N.C., and chairman of the American Stroke Association's stroke
council.

Because the study was small and relatively short, "We don't know at
this point what the patients will be like six months or a year from
now," he said.

Goldstein was not involved in the study, which was conducted by a team
at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in
Boston.

According to lead researcher Dr. Felipe Fregni, rTMS seeks to slow
activity in the side of the brain unaffected by stroke. In that sense,
the treatment works on the same principle as "constraint-induced
therapy" -- a successful rehabilitation strategy where a stroke
survivor's healthy limb is restrained, forcing the affected limb to
function better.

Researchers elsewhere are investigating the use of rTMS for a number
of neurological conditions. Previous work on stroke paved the way for
the current trial, Fregni said.

"We know that several sessions of rTMS can increase the magnitude and
duration of the beneficial effects, so we assessed the effect of five
sessions," Fregni said in a prepared statement.

The trial included 15 people who had suffered strokes at least a year
earlier. Ten got rTMS treatment to ease activity in the motor cortex
area of the undamaged hemisphere of the brain. The other five patients
got a sham treatment.

Testing reaction time of the patient's stroke-affected hands, the
researchers found that those who got rTMS got 30 percent faster after
five days of treatment. This effect lasted for two weeks, they said.
The improvement increased early as the number of treatments increased.
Patients were, on average, 10 percent, 20 percent, 27 percent and 30
percent faster on days two, three, four and five of treatment,
respectively, Fregni noted.

Goldstein said that although these motor improvements look promising,
it's still unclear whether they will translate into better long-term
physical performance, he said. "We need studies for a longer period of
time with measures of the [patients'] quality of life," Goldstein
said.

Studies of rTMS and stroke are also under way at the Emory University
School of Medicine in Atlanta, said researcher Andrew J. Butler, an
assistant professor of rehabilitation medicine at that institution.

"We have a slightly different perspective," Butler said. "They are
using it on the unaffected hemisphere in hopes it will reduce the
amount of damage. We are using it in conjunction with physical
constraint therapy. We use excitatory pulses into the affected
hemisphere," he said.

The Emory group's work with stroke patients has not yet been submitted
to a medical journal for publication, Butler said.

In another hopeful development, researchers at the U.S. National
Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke reported that they had
stimulated the growth of new brain cells in rats after a stroke. The
researchers said they used a protein to activate the stem cells,
setting off a cascade effect that created new brain cells. Many rats
given the treatment regained the function they lost after the stroke,
the researchers reported in the journal Nature.

More information

Find out more about rTMS at the Society for Neuroscience.

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