NCT04048083

Computer-aided and Mental Trainings Induced Plasticity of Sensorimotor Cortex in Patients Born Without Upper Limbs

Effect of Mental and Computer-aided Training of Reaching and Grasping Movements on Motor Control Processes in People With Bilateral Upper Limb Congenital Transverse Deficiency

• Status: Unknown
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 18 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Wroclaw University of Health and Sport Sciences · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 25 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

This project will explore a potentially powerful trainings that may be administered before upper extremity transplantation to induced plasticity of sensorimotor cortex in humans with congenital absence of upper limbs. We believe that engaging this population to computer-aided and/or mental trainings would facilitate structural and functional reorganization of the brain to promote motor function recovery.

Detailed description

This project will explore a potentially powerful trainings that may be administered before upper extremity transplantation to induced plasticity of sensorimotor cortex in humans with congenital absence of upper limbs. Our aim is to compare neurophysiological outcome of bilateral upper limb congenital transverse deficiency humans who are engaged in different types of training (mental-MT, computer-aided training-CAT and subjects receiving both type of trainings-CAMT). We hypothesize that all forms of training provide plastic changes in sensorimotor cortex. Specifically, we hypothesize that for CAMT group we will observe more prompt CNS-reorganization as compared to MT and CAT groups. Our second aim is to examine mechanisms of neural and muscular system plasticity underlying neurophysiological function reorganization following the specific training and also to develop a computer system for training subjects through visual biofeedback. The control procedure of virtual upper extremity should be realized through recognition of intention of hand motion based on biosignals analysis. Our protocol contains twelve weeks of trainings with three training sessions during a week (on Monday, Wednesday and Friday) and four measurement sessions (before the training period - PRE, after 4 weeks of trainings - POST4, after 8 weeks of trainings - POST8 and after 12 weeks of training - POST12). Based on different methods we will use, we would like to ewaluate: structural changes in CNS, functional changes in CNS, functional changes in peripheral nervous system and functional changes in muscles of upper extremity stump by comparing results to the pre-training (PRE) values (with results from POST4, POST8 and POST12) and across the groups.

Conditions

• Amelia of Upper Limb

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Mental trainings	Patients will receive 36 trainings (12 weeks with 3 trainings a week) of mental, kinesthetic reaching-to-grasp movement. During each training session they will perform 3 practice trials by following the instructions, after practicing 3 trials, the instructions will be discontinued, and subjects will perform 30 mental movements by following auditory cues.
BEHAVIORAL	Computer-aided trainings	Patients will receive 36 trainings (12 weeks with 3 trainings a week) of visual feedback of reaching-to-grasp movement. During each training session they will be sitting on a chair, in front of a computer screen observing simple tasks of reaching and precision fine grasping of a small object with 4 fingers of virtual upper extremity using the visualization software that will be coded specifically for the purpose of this experiment.
BEHAVIORAL	Computer-aided and mental trainings	Patients will receive 36 trainings (12 weeks with 3 trainings a week) of mental, kinesthetic reaching-to-grasp movement that will be supplemented by visual feedback of this task by the visualization software that will be coded specifically for the purpose of this experiment (they will receive trainings that link the features of the two mentioned above types of training (MT and CAT).
OTHER	No trainings	Healthy controls without any kind of training

Timeline

• Start date: 2014-03-11
• Primary completion: 2016-09-09
• Completion: 2019-12-01
• First posted: 2019-08-07
• Last updated: 2019-08-07

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Poland