Restorative therapies to enhance sensorimotor recovery following cerebral ischemia

The development of therapies that aim to facilitate functional recovery has identified potential approaches in stroke research. The main advantage of restorative therapies is their delayed administration after acute necrotic cell death, when the treatment can be combined with intensive rehabilitation and medication for poststroke complications to further enhance therapeutic benefit. Emerging understanding of brain repair and plasticity mechanisms after cerebral insults has revealed novel therapeutic targets including the promotion of axonal sprouting, altered perilesional GABA and glutamate receptor signaling, and enhancement of angiogenesis and endogenous neurogenesis. Interestingly, it seems that intensive rehabilitative training such as constraint-induced movement therapy also acts through these brain repair mechanisms, which may have an additive impact on functional recovery.