New series of papers call for a global recovery treatment consensus for stoke patients

The absolute number of people who have a stroke every year; stroke survivors, related deaths, and the overall global burden of stroke is increasing. Neurorehabilitation clinicians and researchers have long been aware of the limited evidence for stroke recovery and rehabilitation.

A number of issues limit the translation of pre-clinical evidence into clinical trials. There is an absence of standardised terminology, recovery biomarkers are not well defined, there is a lack of consistent timeframes or measures to examine outcomes, and agreed methods for developing, monitoring, evaluating and reporting interventions directed at improving recovery are lacking.

Last year for the first time, a group of the world's top neurorecovery researchers met at the first Stroke Recovery and Rehabilitation Roundtable to build consensus on how to develop, conduct and report stroke research on the key priority areas of: pre-clinical recovery research, biomarkers of recovery, intervention development, monitoring and reporting and measurement in clinical trials.

These recommendations from this timely and much needed roundtable, published today in the SAGE journal the International Journal of Stroke.