Stem Cell Treatment for Ischemic Stroke Recovery

Stroke Rehabilitation and Motor Recovery

OBJECTIVE

Up to 50% of the nearly 800,000 patients who experience a new or recurrent stroke each year in the United States fail to achieve full independence afterward. More effective approaches to enhance motor recovery following stroke are needed. This article reviews the rehabilitative principles and strategies that can be used to maximize post-stroke recovery.

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

Evidence dictates that mobilization should not begin prior to 24 hours following stroke, but detailed guidelines beyond this are lacking. Specific classes of potentially detrimental medications should be avoided in the early days poststroke. Patients with stroke who are unable to return home should be referred for evaluation to an inpatient rehabilitation facility. Research suggests that a substantial increase in both the dose and intensity of upper and lower extremity exercise is beneficial. A clinical trial supports vagus nerve stimulation as an adjunct to occupational therapy for motor recovery in the upper extremity. The data remain somewhat mixed as to whether robotics, transcranial magnetic stimulation, functional electrical stimulation, and transcranial direct current stimulation are better than dose-matched traditional exercise. No current drug therapy has been proven to augment exercise poststroke to enhance motor recovery.

ESSENTIAL POINTS

Neurologists will collaborate with rehabilitation professionals for several months following a patient's stroke. Many questions still remain about the ideal exercise regimen to maximize motor recovery in patients poststroke. The next several years will likely bring a host of new research studies exploring the latest strategies to enhance motor recovery using poststroke exercise.

Nanoparticle and Stem Cell Combination Therapy for the Management of Stroke

Stroke is currently one of the primary causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Unfortunately, the available treatments for stroke are still extremely limited. Indeed, stem cell (SC) therapy is a new option for the treatment of stroke that could significantly expand the therapeutic time window of stroke. Some proposed mechanisms for stroke-based SC therapy are the incorporation of SCs into the host brain to replace dead or damaged cells/tissues. Moreover, acute cell delivery can inhibit apoptosis and decrease lesion size, providing immunomudolatory and neuroprotection effects. However, several major SC problems related to SCs such as homing, viability, uncontrolled differentiation, and possible immune response, have limited SC therapy. A combination of SC therapy with nanoparticles (NPs) can be a solution to address these challenges. NPs have received considerable attention in regulating and controlling the behavior of SCs because of their unique physicochemical properties. By reviewing the pathophysiology of stroke and the therapeutic benefits of SCs and NPs, we hypothesize that combined therapy will offer a promising future in the field of stroke management. In this work, we discuss recent literature in SC research combined with NP-based strategies that may have a synergistic outcome after stroke incidence.