A 6-Month Home-Based Functional Electrical Stimulation Program for Foot Drop in a Post-Stroke Patient: Considerations on a Time Course Analysis of Walking Performance

Romain David (1, 2) , Maxime Billot (2, 1) , Etienne Ojardias (3) , Bernard Parratte (1, 2) , Manuel Roulaud (2, 1) , Amine Ounajim (2, 1) , Frédéric Louis , Hachemi Meklat , Philippe Foucault , Christophe Lombard , Anne Jossart (1) , Laura Mainini (1) , Martin Lavallière (4) , Lisa Goudman (5, 6, 7) , Maarten Moens (7, 5) , Davy Laroche (8, 9, 10) , Marjorie Salga (11, 12) , François Genêt (11, 12) , Jean-Christophe Daviet (13, 14) , Anaick Perrochon (14) , Maxence Compagnat (14, 13) , Philippe Rigoard (2, 15, 1, 16)

1 CHU de Poitiers [La Milétrie] - Centre hospitalier universitaire de Poitiers = Poitiers University Hospital
2 PRISMATICS - prismatics
3 CHU ST-E - Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Saint-Etienne [CHU Saint-Etienne]
4 UQAC - Université du Québec à Chicoutimi
5 VUB - Vrije Universiteit Brussel
6 FWO - Research Foundation - Flanders [Brussel]
7 Universitair Ziekenhuis [Brussels, Belgium]
8 CAPS - Cognition, Action, et Plasticité Sensorimotrice [Dijon - U1093]
9 CIC-P803 - Centre d'Investigation Clinique 1432 (Dijon) - Module Plurithématique : Périnatalité Cancérologie Handicap et Ophtalmologie
10 CHU Dijon
11 END-ICAP - Handicap neuromusculaire : Physiopathologie, Biothérapie et Pharmacologies appliquées
12 Hôpital Raymond Poincaré [AP-HP]
13 Service de Médecine Physique et de Réadaptation [CHU Limoges]
14 HAVAE - Handicap, Activité, Vieillissement, Autonomie, Environnement
15 PPrime [Poitiers] - Institut Pprime [UPR 3346]
16 ISAE-ENSMA - École Nationale Supérieure de Mécanique et d’Aérotechnique [Poitiers]

Foot drop is a common disability in post-stroke patients and represents a challenge for the clinician. To date, ankle foot orthosis (AFO) combined with conventional rehabilitation is the gold standard of rehabilitation management. AFO has a palliative mechanical action without actively restoring the associated neural function. Functional electrical stimulation (FES), consisting of stimulation of the peroneal nerve pathway, represents an alternative approach. By providing an FES device (Bioness L-300, BIONESS, Valencia, CA, USA) for 6 months to a post-stroke 22-year-old woman with a foot drop, our goal was to quantify its potential benefit on walking capacity. The gait parameters and the temporal evolution of the speed were collected with a specific connected sole device (Feet Me®) during the 10-m walking, the time up and go, and the 6-minute walking tests with AFO, FES, or without any device (NO). As a result, the walking speed changes on 10-m were clinically significant with an increase from the baseline to 6 months in AFO (+0.14 m.s−1), FES (+0.36 m.s−1) and NO (+0.32 m.s−1) conditions. In addition, the speed decreased at about 4-min in the 6-minute walking test in NO and AFO conditions, while the speed increased in the FES conditions at baseline and after 1, 3, and 6 months. In addition to the walking performance improvement, monitoring the gait speed in an endurance test after an ecological rehabilitation training program helps to examine the walking performance in post-stroke patients and to propose a specific rehabilitation program.

Mots clés: ankle-foot orthosis; foot drop; functional electrical stimulation; mobility; rehabilitation; walking

Domaines: Sciences du Vivant [q-bio]

Romain David, Maxime Billot, Etienne Ojardias, Bernard Parratte, Manuel Roulaud, et al.. A 6-Month Home-Based Functional Electrical Stimulation Program for Foot Drop in a Post-Stroke Patient: Considerations on a Time Course Analysis of Walking Performance. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2022, 19 (15), pp.9204. ⟨10.3390/ijerph19159204⟩. ⟨hal-03750751⟩