Brain Motor Control Assessment Post Early Intensive Hand Rehabilitation After Spinal Cord Injury

This study assessed voluntary movements in patients with spinal cord injury (SCI) using the Brain Motor Control Assessment (BMCA) to see if it could improve clinical assessments and track patient recovery. Ten participants were recruited, with some receiving usual care and others receiving intensive hand training with functional electrical stimulation (FES) for 8 weeks. BMCA assessments were conducted 4 times over a year. The study found that while some participants improved significantly in hand function after rehabilitation, this wasn't always reflected in the muscle activation patterns captured by BMCA, suggesting BMCA can provide more detailed information.

• 1
  BMCA showed a significant main effect of task and assessment time on the Similarity Index, which measures how closely a participant's muscle activation pattern matches that of neurologically intact individuals.
• 2
  Some participants achieved maximum scores on the Action Research Arm Test (ARAT) at baseline and maintained them, but BMCA revealed involuntary coactivation of irrelevant muscles during movements.
• 3
  Five participants showed multilevel tendon tap responses and coactivation of unnecessary muscles during voluntary tasks, indicating supraspinal influences over the motor circuitry.