Contralateral hand anesthesia transiently improves poststroke sensory deficits.

Abstract

To test a possible strategy to alleviate somatosensory deficits after stroke. 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. We found that sensibility in the affected hand improved with intact hand anesthesia, but not with intact foot anesthesia or no anesthesia. 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.