Medicine and Health

Medicine and Health

The study effectively supported the first and fourth hypotheses and rejected the second and third hypotheses. The first hypothesis identified that constraint-induced movement therapy (CIMT) was effective in increasing upper-extremity (EU) movement among patients with post-CVA and post-UE dysfunction. However, the second hypothesis did not find any differences in the effects of CIMT and bilateral treatment on WMFT scores. Thus, the results from the CIMT and bilateral groups were comparable to other CIMT studies. In addition, the study demonstrated that participants with more impaired EU functions that received either CIMT or bilateral treatment displayed significant improvements. Nonetheless, it failed to demonstrate that participants with significantly impaired EU functions receiving either intervention would highlight greater WMFT gains than less impaired participants.

There are various implications of this study’s results on practice. Foremost, the study demonstrated that both CIMT and bilateral treatment have substantial gains in increasing EU functioning for patients; as a result, both these techniques can be widely adopted as treatment interventions. However, one of the biases of the study is that actual behavior learned through bilateral groups may have been easily well-suited for the participant’s routine activities as opposed to activities for participants in the constrained group. This bias could have resulted in more failures with the CIMT treatment within the impaired group. Similarly, it could account for why the more impaired CIMT group had the least improvement with the treatment even among the more impaired bilateral group.

One limitation of the study is that it lacked a comparison group offering bilateral treatment at a lower intensity to control for the effects of non-specific factors. Nonetheless, the conclusions of this study were appropriate given the methods and results since the study design prevented the elimination of non-specific factors such as duration, frequency, and intensity of intervention from accounting for observable improvements.

The two group interventions were differentiated. For the CIMT group intervention, participants were required only to practice functional activities on their affected hands. This group was also barred from using their unaffected UE for almost all activities. However, participants in the bilateral group could use both hands for all activities. The task was structured to be within their capability to ensure the participant’s task performance. CIMT participants had assistive devices to aid with their task completion. Many of the tasks the participants tested were repetitive and routinely done. These tasks were designed to improve motor control and function across many motions.

The first day of treatment was used for orientation and introduction. The treatment interventions began in the morning with meetings and ended in the afternoon. During the morning meetings, participants were required to disclose the activities performed and constraints encountered while performing them. In addition, participants were divided into teams to work together during their routines. The daily tasks included cooking, setting the table, serving, cleaning up, and doing craft activities. The intervention could be replicated in practice since the researchers have outlined each step during the intervention process and how often the intervention routines were performed. Thus, another group of participants and researchers could replicate the study with a high level of accuracy.