Effective Stroke Rehabilitation: An Essential Component of Complete Stroke Management

Purpose:  The purposes are to learn about the definition of rehabilitation, learn about stroke recovery, and learn about the different types of physiotherapy for rehabilitation.

Materials and Methods: Cerebrovascular accidents are responsible for 5.54 million deaths worldwide each year. Forty percent of the stroke survivors are left with some degree of functional impairment, and this becomes a burden to the individual and the society because of economic, social, and emotional losses. This burden can be reduced by improving stroke prevention and acute care, but the rehabilitation of an individual after stroke is equally important.

Results: Rehabilitation is a complex set of processes involving several professional disciplines aimed at improving the quality of life for people facing difficulties caused by chronic disease. Rehabilitation is important to limit the impact of stroke-related brain damage on daily life by using therapeutic and problem-solving approaches with the help of a team of doctors, nurses, therapists, social service staff, and psychologists. The key purposes of rehabilitation are the realization of potential, re-enablement, resettlement, role fulfillment, and readjustment. Rehabilitation is important in both the early and late phases of stroke recovery. The early phase focuses on techniques that harness the potential for neuroplastic changes by providing organized inpatient care by a multidisciplinary specialist team, and the late phase focuses on encouraging adaptive responses and coping strategies. Physiotherapy after stroke has been shown to be very effective. Task-oriented exercise training to restore the balance and gait of the patient has proven to be the most useful type of physiotherapy program. Constraint-induced movement therapy, treadmill training, and aerobic exercise training have also been found to be helpful. New emerging approaches to stroke rehabilitation are motor imagery, robotics, and progressive resistance training. Career support and home resettlement are also very important aspects of rehabilitation because they are essential to decrease economic burden, anxiety, and depression.

Conclusions: Effective stroke rehabilitation is imperative to improve poststroke patient outcomes and to decrease the health care costs associated with stroke. It is essential that all personnel involved in patient care have basic knowledge about the rehabilitation process because early intervention has shown to have better outcomes.