Article

Mental practice (MP) is usually provided in combination with other therapies, and
new developments for neurofeedback to support MP have been made recently. The
objectives of this study were to evaluate the effectiveness of MP and to
investigate the intervention characteristics including neurofeedback that may
affect treatment outcome.
The Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials,
PubMed, Embase, KoreaMed, Scopus, Web of Science, PEDro, and CIRRIE were searched
from inception to March 2017 for randomized controlled trials to assess the
effect of MP for upper limb rehabilitation after stroke. Fugl-Meyer Assessment
(FMA) was used as the outcome measure for meta-analysis. Twenty-five trials met
the inclusion criteria, and 15 trials were eligible for meta-analysis. Among the
trials selected for meta-analysis, MP was added to conventional therapy in eight
trials or to modified constraint-induced movement therapy in one trial. The other
trials provided neurofeedback to support MP: MP-guided neuromuscular electrical
stimulation (NMES) in four trials and MP-guided robot-assisted therapy (RAT) in
two trials. MP added to conventional therapy resulted in significantly higher FMA
gain than conventional therapy alone. MP-guided NMES showed superior result than
conventional NMES as well. However, the FMA gain of MP-guided RAT was not
significantly higher than RAT alone. We suggest that MP is an effective
complementary therapy either given with neurofeedback or not. Neurofeedback
applied to MP showed different results depending on the therapy provided. This
study has limitations because of heterogeneity and inadequate quality of trials.
Further research is requested.

Langue : ANGLAIS