Following a stroke, the resulting lesion creates contralateral motor impairment and an interhemispheric imbalance involving hyperexcitability of the contralesional hemisphere. Neuronal reorganization may occur on both the ipsilesional and contralesional hemispheres during recovery to regain motor functionality and therefore bilateral activation for the hemiparetic side is often observed. Althou...

Introduction. Restoration of upper extremity (UE) functional use remains a challenge for individuals following stroke. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a noninvasive modality that modulates cortical excitability and is being explored as a means to potentially ameliorate these deficits. The purpose of this study was to evaluate, in the presence of chronic stroke, the effect...

INTRODUCTION Unilateral brain damage can heterogeneously alter spatial processing. Very often brain-lesioned patients fail to report (neglect) items appearing within the contralesional space. Much less often patients mislocalize items' spatial position. We investigated whether a top-down attentional load manipulation (dual-tasking), known to result in contralesional omissions even in apparently...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE In children having suffered from neonatal arterial ischemic stroke, the relationship between contralesional hand performance and structural changes in brain areas remote from the infarct site was examined. METHODS Using voxel-based morphometry, we correlated contralesional gross manual dexterity assessed by the box and block test and whole-brain gray and white-matter vo...

BACKGROUND Environmental toxins are suspected to play a role in the pathogenesis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). In an attempt to determine which pathways these toxins can use to enter motor neurons we compared the distribution of mercury in the CNS of a human and of mice that had been exposed to inorganic mercury. RESULTS In the human who had been exposed to metallic mercury, mercury...

There have been controversies on the contribution of contralesional hemispheric compensation to functional recovery of the upper extremity after a unilateral brain lesion. Some studies have demonstrated that contralesional hemispheric compensation may be an important recovery mechanism. However, in many cases where the hemispheric lesion is large, this form of compensation is relatively limited...