Effect of intensity and duration of post-stroke treadmill training in human stroke: A meta-analysis

Introduction: Stroke is the third cause of death after cancer and studies on efficacy, mechanism, and comparisons of training methods have been performed for many years (1). Post stroke treadmill training is continually used in rehabilitation due to its effectiveness in both functional mobility and cardiovascular fitness in stroke. Among several exercise paradigms treadmill running is commonly adopted exercise model (2). The main intent of the current study was to evaluate the treadmill training studies on stroke subjects with vary intensity and volume interventions in the field of exercise training, according to pubmed results with a lowest risk of bias. Methodology: We used http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/advanced/ as a reference search from Jan 1980 to Jul 2015, applying the medical topic headlines. We reviewed all related studies and classified 49 as 129 published human studies, which assumed our inclusion criteria. We used two common tests such as speed of treadmill and Function tests and four levels were determined as; Low intensity (≤ 0.6 m/s)- Low volume (≤ 500 minutes), Low intensity (≤ 0.6 m/s)- High volume ( 500 minutes), High intensity ( 0.6 m/s)- Low volume (≤ 500 minutes), High intensity ( 0.6 m/s)- High volume ( 500 minutes). All analyses were carried out with amp;quot;metan amp;quot; commands of STATA version 12. Results: Entirely in the human studies, post-stroke treadmill training regardless of high or low intensities and high or low volumes had a 94% greater motor function recovery than did active-less humans (SMD= 0.603; 95% CI, 0.548 to 0.659; P=0.0001). Post-stroke treadmill training for high intensity- high volume and high intensity-low volume subgroups had 96% and 92% greater motor function recovery respectively, than did active-less humans (SMD= 0.571; 95% CI, 0.475 to 0.667; P=0.0001 amp; SMD= 0.405; 95% CI, 0.220 to 0.589; P=0.0001, respectively). Overall heterogeneity (I2) between all subgroups was 74.8%. Discussion: Eighty-four percent of human studies were lacked exactness in their training methods because they did not used relative intensity - aka HRR, max aerobic speed- or VO2max indices. Moreover, in the human studies totally most important finding was that post-stroke treadmill training regardless of high or low intensities and high or low volumes had a greater motor function recovery than did active-less human (3). References: 1. Hayes K, Sprague S, Guo M, Davis W, Friedman A, Kumar A, et al. Forced, not voluntary, exercise effectively induces neuroprotection in stroke. Acta Neuropathol. 2008;115(3):289-96. 2. Lee CD, Folsom AR, Blair SN. Physical activity and stroke risk: a meta-analysis. Stroke. 2003;34(10):2475-81. 3. Veerbeek JM, van Wegen E, van Peppen R, van der Wees PJ, Hendriks E, Rietberg M, et al. What is the evidence for physical therapy poststroke? A systematic review and meta-analysis. PLoS One. 2014;9(2):2014.