Common pain syndromes in stroke patients: review of two cases.

Due to multiple neurological and musculoskeletal factors, stroke patients are at significant risk for the development of disabling pain syndromes. This article provides examples of two commonly encountered clinical situations, poststroke shoulder and poststroke hip pain. Appropriate use of imaging, medications, modalities, and injections are discussed for the purpose of enhancing management strategies that decrease pain and increase overall function.

Amantadine treatment of hemispatial neglect: a double-blind, placebo-controlled study.

Objective: The resemblance of some aspects of the hemispatial neglect syndrome (hypokinesia, decreased arousal) to aspects of Parkinsonian syndromes, and the success of amantadine in treating disorders of attention, prompted a placebo-controlled, double-blind trial of amantadine, an inhibitor of the N-methyl D-aspartate (NMDA) glutamate receptor that modulates dopamine transmission, in four patients with chronic hemispatial neglect.

Design: Patients received placebo or 100 mg of amantadine twice a day in an ABA design. Dependent measures of drug effect included an extensive battery of tests assessing arousal, hemiinattention, hemihypokinesia, personal neglect, disability, anosognosia, family burden, and naturalistic action.

On pure word deafness, temporal processing, and the left hemisphere.

Pure word deafness (PWD) is a rare neurological syndrome characterized by severe difficulties in understanding and reproducing spoken language, with sparing of written language comprehension and speech production. The pathognomonic disturbance of auditory comprehension appears to be associated with a breakdown in processes involved in mapping auditory input to lexical representations of words, but the functional locus of this disturbance and the localization of the responsible lesion have long been disputed. We report here on a woman with PWD resulting from a circumscribed unilateral infarct involving the left superior temporal lobe who demonstrated significant problems processing transitional spectrotemporal cues in both speech and nonspeech sounds.

Home forced use in an outpatient rehabilitation program for adults with hemiplegia: a pilot study.

The objective of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a program of traditional outpatient neurological rehabilitation that included home forced use. In total, 17 patients with chronic stroke and 1 patient with subacute stroke (mean time poststroke = 27.6 months) completed an individualized program consisting of seven 2-hour treatment sessions composed of 1 hour of occupational therapy and 1 hour of physical therapy.

Constraint-induced therapy for a child with hemiplegic cerebral palsy: a case report.

A 12-year-old boy with hemiplegic cerebral palsy (CP) presented with decreased function in his left upper extremity. He was treated with a 3-week protocol of constraint-induced therapy (CIT) consisting of six 2-hour sessions of physical and occupational therapy, plus home practice. Improvements in upper-extremity function were found in the mean and median time for completion of the Wolf Motor Function Test immediately posttreatment and at 8-month follow-up.