VISTA-Rehab: a resource for stroke rehabilitation trials.

Background: Stroke rehabilitation is a complex intervention. Many factors influence the interaction between the patient and the elements of the intervention. Rehabilitation interventions are aimed at altering different domains of patient outcome including body functions, activity and participation.

Reflecting upon line bisection: mirror reversal increases the magnitude of pseudoneglect.

In order to investigate the effect of congruent and non-congruent motor actions upon pseudoneglect, 'real' lines and mirror reversed 'virtual' lines were bisected in left and right hemispaces by 50 right handed subjects, 25 males, 25 females, with both left and right hands. Statistical analysis revealed significantly greater pseudoneglect for the non-congruent motor condition (virtual > real), hand (left > right), gender (male > female) and hemispace for virtual lines (left > right). These results are explained in terms of the interaction between three factors whose influence can jointly and severally result in pseudoneglect: right hemisphere specialization for spatial attention, right hemisphere activation resulting from hand use and sensorimotor discrepancies and the allocation of visual attention.

Hand and hand preferences in use of a visual analogue scale.

Visual analogue scales are commonly used to measure the intensity of sensations, and their validity and reliability have been reported. However, biases similar to those found in visual line bisection have not been investigated. 23 right-handed and 19 left-handed participants, with a mean age of 30.

Accuracy of patient recall of preoperative symptom severity (angina and breathlessness) at one year following aorta-coronary artery bypass grafting.

Aim And Objective: The accuracy with which patients recall their cardiac symptoms prior to aorta-coronary artery bypass grafting is assessed approximately one year after surgery together with patient-related factors potentially influencing accuracy of recall.

Background: This is a novel investigation of patient's rating of preoperative symptom severity before and approximately one year following aorta-coronary artery bypass grafting.

Design: Patients undergoing aorta-coronary artery bypass grafting (n = 208) were recruited preoperatively and 177 of these were successfully followed up at 16.

Memory for pain? A comparison of nonexperiential estimates and patients' reports of the quality and intensity of postoperative pain.

Unlabelled: Prior research has questioned the extent to which postoperative retrospective ratings of acute pain actually reflect memory of that pain. To investigate this issue, pain ratings provided by patients who had undergone vascular surgery were compared with estimates of this pain provided by 2 groups of healthy, nonpatient participants with no personal experience of the surgery. Patient participants rated postoperative pain while actually experiencing it and again 4 to 6 weeks after surgery.

Exploring the phenomenology of memory for pain: is previously experienced acute pain consciously remembered or simply known?

Unlabelled: Whether or not acute pain is recalled by consciously remembering it or by simply knowing about that past pain as an autobiographical fact, and the degree to which it can be accurately anticipated ("precalled") was investigated using the remember/know paradigm. Cold Pressor (CP) pain was induced in 97 healthy participants who precalled CP pain and then reported their actual experiences of CP pain, using the McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ) and a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS). Two weeks later, participants recalled the CP pain and indicated whether each retrospectively selected MPQ descriptor reflected their "remembering" or "knowing" about the pain.

Analgesia through the looking-glass? A randomized controlled trial investigating the effect of viewing a 'virtual' limb upon phantom limb pain, sensation and movement.

The extent to which viewing a 'virtual' limb, the mirror image of an intact limb, modifies the experience of a phantom limb, was investigated in 80 lower limb amputees before, during and after repeated attempts to simultaneously move both intact and phantom legs. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of two conditions, a control condition in which they only viewed the movements of their intact limb and a mirror condition in which they additionally viewed the movements of a 'virtual' limb. Although the mirror condition elicited a significantly greater number of phantom limb movements than the control condition, it did not attenuate phantom limb pain and sensations any more than the control condition.

Visual line bisection in sinistrals and dextrals as a function of hemispace, hand, and scan direction.

Visual line bisection was investigated in 26 sinistral and 24 dextral subjects as a function of hemispace, hand and scan direction. An ANOVA revealed significant main effects for hand preference, due to the mean bisection errors of dextral subjects being significantly leftward of those of sinistral subjects; for hand, due to the bisection errors of the left hand being significantly to the left of the right hand; and for scan, due to the bisection errors following a left scan being significantly to the left of a right scan. One significant interaction was found, that between hand and direction of scan, due to a significant difference between left and right hands following a scan from the left but not following a scan from the right.

A comparison of the effects of preferred music, arithmetic and humour on cold pressor pain.

Research studies of 'audioanalgesia', the ability of music to affect pain perception, have significantly increased in number during the past two decades. Listening to preferred music in particular may provide an emotionally engaging distraction capable of reducing both the sensation of pain itself and the accompanying negative affective experience. The current study uses experimentally induced cold pressor pain to compare the effects of preferred music to two types of distracting stimuli found effective within the previous studies; mental arithmetic, a cognitive distraction, and humour, which may emotionally engage us in a similar manner to music.

Temperature and the cold pressor test.

Unlabelled: As a method of experimental pain induction, the cold pressor test is thought to mimic the effects of chronic conditions effectively. A survey of previous studies using the cold pressor, however, revealed a lack of standardization and control of water temperature, questioning comparability and reliability. This study reports the influence of temperature on pain tolerance and intensity by using a commercially available circulating water bath.

Increased motor control of a phantom leg in humans results from the visual feedback of a virtual leg.

Although previous research reported that the visual feedback of a 'virtual arm' increased the control of a phantom arm, it did not consider that the repeated attempt to move the phantom may have contributed to the effect. Twenty-one lower limb amputees reported the response of their phantom leg during repeated attempts to move both legs in one of two conditions, a control condition in which the amputee only viewed the movements of their intact leg and an experimental condition in which the amputee additionally viewed the movements of a 'virtual' leg. It was found that viewing a virtual leg resulted in amputees reporting a significantly greater number of movements of their phantom leg than with attempted movement alone.

Remembering an everyday pain: the role of knowledge and experience in the recall of the quality of dysmenorrhoea.

The ability to describe the quality of a previous pain may be thought to be better if one had experienced that particular pain because information stored in episodic and/or semantic memory is available rather than if one had not and could only guess what the pain may be like on the basis of information stored in semantic memory. However research has shown that not only is the quality of labour pain poorly recalled by women who have given birth but also it is no better described by them than by women who have never given birth at all. In order to replicate this effect for an everyday pain, the ability to recall the quantity and the quality of dysmenorrhoea was measured in two groups of women.