Contralateral hand anesthesia transiently improves poststroke sensory deficits.

Objective: To test a possible strategy to alleviate somatosensory deficits after stroke.

Methods: Here, we applied ischemic nerve block to the intact hand of patients with chronic stroke, which in healthy subjects elicits improvements in sensibility of the other hand.

Results: We found that sensibility in the affected hand improved with intact hand anesthesia, but not with intact foot anesthesia or no anesthesia.

Interpretation: We conclude that reduction of sensory input from the intact hand leads to site-specific improvements in tactile discriminative skills in the affected hand after the period of anesthesia, a potentially relevant finding in designing neurorehabilitative interventions.