Revealing an extended critical window of recovery post-stroke

ABSTRACT The impact of rehabilitation on post-stroke motor recovery and its dependency on the patient’s chronicity remain unclear. The existence and regularity of a, so called, proportional recovery rule across a range of functional deficits and therapies supports the notion that functional interventions have little or no impact beyond spontaneous recovery rates in a ‘critical window of recovery’ which lasts from 3 to 6 months post-stroke. In this meta-analysis, we apply a bootstrap analysis method to assess the overall impact of a specific VR-based rehabilitation protocol for the upper extremities on a homogeneous sample of 219 individuals with hemiparesis at various stages post stroke. Our analysis uncovers a precise gradient of sensitivity to treatment that expands more than one year beyond the limits of the so-called ‘critical window of recovery’. These findings redefine the limits of the so-called ‘critical window of recovery’ and suggest that stroke-derived plasticity mechanisms do facilitate functional recovery even at the chronic and late chronic stage.