Active sensory training for severe hand anesthesia with left hemiplegia after chronic stroke:

A case study

Abstract

We observed a male who suffered from severe somatosensory anesthesia that continued for six months after a stroke. He received an active sensory relearning program for 1 hour, twice a week, for 8 weeks. He repeatedly performed various tactile discrimination and identification tasks (Carey, 1993, 2012), in which the clinician asked him to visually confirm the correctness of the task and to compare it with the sensation of the affected hand by touching the non-affected hand. The difficulty of each task was adjusted for differences in the number of choices and stimuli. As a result, the affected arm use in daily life and somatosensory functions were improved, and accompanying changes in daily life were also reported. The active, sensory re-learning may have facilitated conscious compensation that uses residual function. Such compensation may have contributed to the improvement of the patient’s somatosensory function and activities of daily living.