New Stroke Research Combines Brain Stimulation, Gait Training

Thanks to a $1.5 million grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a University of Illinois at Chicago researcher will test whether brain stimulation combined with gait training can improve patients’ ability to walk after a stroke. Sangeetha Madhavan, assistant professor of physical therapy and director of UIC’s Brain Plasticity Lab, and her colleagues study how the brain changes in response to stroke, and how to tap into the brain’s potential to help in a functional recovery. Employing a top-down approach to stimulate the brain to make it more responsive to the therapy, she will use transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS, which passes a very low level of current through the motor area in the brain that controls the legs. Subjects will be evaluated at the end of the four weeks and again three months later, at which times their walking speed and other clinical and quality-of-life measures will be assessed. People with stroke differ in how they respond to therapy, Madhavan said, and the transcranial magnetic stimulation technique “gives us a way to understand why one individual changes differently from another.” To learn more about the study, click here.