Contralesional Inhibitory rTMS for Recovery of Arm Function After Stroke

Rehabilitation is critical for reducing stroke-related disability. Although intensive physiotherapy improves function after a stroke, the frequency and intensity of therapy in a standard clinical rehabilitation session is insufficient to invoke these changes. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a safe, non-invasive method of stimulating the human brain. Repetitive TMS (rTMS) may have the potential to enhance the brain's ability to re-learn specific functions and reduce the amount of standard therapy required to achieve certain functional gains after stroke. Although two recent multicenter studies have begun to test the benefits of applying rTMS during stroke rehabilitation, large scale clinical trials demonstrating the efficacy of rTMS for post-stroke functional motor recovery are lacking. The use of rTMS interventions in stroke rehabilitation trials has been limited by a lack of consensus regarding the optimal protocol for the clinical application of TMS in stroke populations. The Canadian Platform for Trials in Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation (CanStim) is a national platform that aims to facilitate multicenter clinical trials for non-invasive brain stimulation interventions to augment recovery from stroke. As a first step, CanStim investigators convened a multidisciplinary team of experts in rTMS from institutions across Canada to form the CanStim Consensus Working Group and develop consensus recommendations for a protocol to deliver rTMS as an adjunct to standard therapy in a national stroke rehabilitation clinical trial.

• Inclusion criteria: patients with first ischemic stroke between 2 weeks and 3 months of stroke onset, patients with both cortical and subcortical infarcts, age between 18 and 90 years, English or French as language of daily use, patients must be able to participate in a standard of care upper extremity therapy program and must be able to perform the GRASP AND should have a minimum deficit that they can improve (e.g., <= 56 on FM UE). For the cognitively impaired patients, we will not exclude those with a higher upper limb mobility function. The patients with cognitive complaints, will only be included if they have a score of <24 on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA).
• Exclusion criteria: prior symptomatic ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke, severe comprehension deficit that may compromise informed consent or understanding of instructions, contraindications to MRI and/or TMS, neurodegenerative or psychiatric disease, epilepsy, or EEG-documented epileptic discharges, chronic renal or liver failure, life-threatening diseases limiting life expectancy to less than 6 months and auditory or visual deficits that cannot be corrected and might impair testing. We will not exclude patients with higher upper limb mobility function.