Monoaminergic drugs for motor recovery after ischemic stroke

Today, administering rTPA thrombolytic therapy within the first hours of a stroke is the only validated drug therapy for improving the spontaneous--and most of the time incomplete--recovery of neurological functions post-stroke. However in the past decade, thanks in part to the considerable advances of neuroimaging techniques, we have learned that spontaneous recovery of neurological functions was associated with a wide intracerebral reorganization of the damaged human brain. The question of whether lesioned-brain plasticity can be modulated by external factors like pharmacological agents is now addressed in the hope of improving recovery and reducing the chronic impairments of stroke patients. In this paper, we review the preclinical and clinical evidence for a direct action of SSRIs in promoting recovery in ischemic stroke patients.