Neurophysiological characterization of subacute stroke patients: A longitudinal study

Various degrees of neural reorganization may occur in affected and unaffected hemispheres in the early phase after stroke and several months later. recent literature suggests to apply a stratification based on lesion location and to consider patients with cortico-subcortical and subcortical strokes separately: different lesion location may also influence therapeutic response. in this study we used a longitudinal approach to perform tms assessment (motor evoked potentials,mep,and silent period,sp) and clinical evaluations (barthel index,fugl-meyer assessment for upper limb motor function and wolf motor function test) in 10 cortical-subcortical and 10 subcortical ischemic stroke patients. evaluations were performed in a window between 10 and 45 days (t0) and at 3 months after the acute event (t1). our main finding is that 3 months after the acute event patients affected by subcortical stroke presented a reduction in contralateral sp duration in the unaffected hemisphere; this trend is related to clinical improvement of upper limb motor function. in conclusion,sp proved to be a valid parameter to characterize cortical reorganization patterns in stroke survivors and provided useful information about motor recovery within 3 months in subcortical patients. © 2016 lamola,fanciullacci,sgherri,bertolucci,panarese,micera,rossi and chisari.