The article “Variables explaining functional recovery following motor stroke” is written by Janice Hinkle and published in the Journal of Neuroscience Nursing. It is a descriptive study that focuses on the parents who receive treatment after motor stroke.
The purpose of this article is to give the health care providers and researchers who work in this sphere authoritative data on the importance of “motor strength, lesion volume, age, cognitive status, and post-stroke functional level” and their connection with functional recovery of patients who are recovering after the motor stroke (Hinkle 7).
The author claims that during the fast-paced acute phase of healthcare the medical practitioners should include the cognitive assessment when they deal with the patients who recently had a motor stroke.
The paper deals with the recovery of function in the patients who suffered from the stroke and were at the rehabilitation or had just finished one.
The study includes one independent and five dependent variables.
Independent variable:
- Patients who are dealing with the process of recovery after the motor stroke.
Dependent variables:
- Age (all participants were about 65 years old);
- Lesion volume (approximately 21.5 cm3 according to the magnetic resonance imaging);
- Motor strength (about 6.34 according to the National Institute of Health Stroke Scale);
- Cognition (the Mini-Mental State Examination showed the results of about 24.38 while the Neurobehavioral Cognitive Status Examination – 64.33);
- Post-stroke function (was evaluated with the help of the Functional Independence Measure and turned out to be about 94.05) (Hinkle 7).
Initially, 107 patients were chosen for the study. Still, 100 individuals were enrolled, and 10 of them left the research before the results were gained. This study was “submitted to and received approval from the institutional review boards and access committees of the two hospitals from which participants were selected” (Hinkle 8).
To support her ideas, Janice Hinkle refers to more than forty reliable sources, which are the peer reviewed articles written at the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th centuries. To make her own calculations valid, she applied average results mentioning that the data varies (for, example ± 13 years).
The information was collected with the help of CT, MRI, MMSE, NCSE, NIHSS and FIM results and evaluated by descriptive statistics.
The implications are suggested for the professionals who are going to deal with the patients after the motor stroke, especially for those who will assess them. It is also of advantage for nursing education, as the student will get to know how to treat this group of patients. As there are recommendations for the further research, the article can be claimed to be suggested for nursing studies. It also provides researchers with a range of methods that can be used. The author points out that “the future studies should include follow-up for longer than 3 months and use retention strategies for a larger sample size and compare lesion volumes to total brain volumes in patients with motor stroke” (Hinkle 10).
The study has several limitations. First of all, the variables cannot be applied to all patients who suffered a stroke, in general, as it deals only with those who had a motor stroke. The whole sample did not gain the full data (only 60%). Moreover, “the standard deviation for the lesion volume data was large and a transformation was not used as this variable did not enter the hierarchical regression” (Hinkle 9). One more limitation is the duration of the study (3 months).
Reference
Hinkle J. (2006). Variables explaining functional recovery following motor stroke. The Journal of Neuroscience Nursing, 38(1), 6-12.