Auwal Abdullahi is a specialist neurological rehabilitation therapist at Bayero University, Kano, where he teaches and supervises both undergraduate and postgraduate students. He is a Fellow of the London of Academy of Sports and Health Sciences in Clinical Neurology Sciences. His most recent publications are on neurobiology of recovery of motor function and clinical decision making. He enjoys reading, research, teaching, and writing.
Stroke is increasingly becoming a global health problem. This is because it may lead to death, Long-term disability such as in motor function, and significant burden to the patients and their families. The disability can be prevented or rehabilitated using a physiotherapy technique known as constraint-induced movement therapy (CIMT). The CIMT comprises of task practice with the affected limb, constraint of the unaffected limb, and transfer package to foster compliance and increase the amount of task repetition. It helps to reestablish normal motor control through facilitating changes in physiological functions of the brain, improvement in real-world arm use, and movement precision and quality. However, its protocols vary. Some protocols use number of hours and others use number of repetitions to determine the intensity or the amount of task practice. This chapter argued that CIMT is effective, but the protocols that use a number of hours of task practice are not clear and are resource intensive; and as such they could interfere with the process of clinical decision making. Consequently, it proposed the use of a number of repetitions of task practice to determine the intensity or the amount of task practice and extending the application of CIMT to those with severe impairments after stroke.
Part of the book: Different Areas of Physiotherapy