Abstract
The study examines the effectiveness of intensive occupational therapy (OT) in improving upper limb and cognitive function in patients with spinocerebellar degeneration (SCD) with and without multiple-site symptoms. In this retrospective before-after clinical study, we included patients with pure cerebellar ataxia (eight with cortical cerebellar ataxia and two with suspected spinocerebellar ataxia type-6) and polyphyletic disorder (twelve with multiple system atrophy-cerebellar and two with Machado-Joseph disease). The following were evaluated at the time of admission and discharge:(1) upper-limb ataxia based on the Scale for the Assessment and Rating of Ataxia (SARA) and (2) the Trail Making Test (TMT) to evaluate cognitive functions such as attention. The data were analyzed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test with Holm’s method. At the time of discharge, significant improvements in SARA and TMT scores were observed in both groups, indicating that OT improves upper limb ataxia and cognitive function in patients with SCD with or without multiple-site symptoms.
