ArticleBrain : a journal of neurology2019
Recovery after stroke: not so proportional after all?
Article in Brain : a journal of neurology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 68 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
68 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Predictive Models for Motor Outcomes From Deep Brain Stimulation in Parkinson's Disease: A Systematic Review.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Pooled it
- The Prognostic Utility of Electroencephalography in Stroke Recovery: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Neurorehabilitation and neural repair · 2022Pooled it
- Characteristics and Applications of Technology-Aided Hand Functional Assessment: A Systematic Review.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Pooled it
- Predicting upper extremity motor improvement following therapy using EEG-based connectivity in chronic stroke.NeuroRehabilitation · 2022Trial
- Age is negatively associated with upper limb recovery after conventional but not robotic rehabilitation in patients with stroke: a secondary analysis of a randomized-controlled trial.Journal of neurology · 2021Trial
- Is Recovery of Somatosensory Impairment Conditional for Upper-Limb Motor Recovery Early After Stroke?Neurorehabilitation and neural repair · 2020Trial
- Elements virtual rehabilitation improves motor, cognitive, and functional outcomes in adult stroke: evidence from a randomized controlled pilot study.Journal of neuroengineering and rehabilitation · 2019Trial
- Digital Platform to Provide Health Data Feedback for Neurorehabilitation Patients: User-Centered Development and Proof-of-Concept Usability Study.JMIR rehabilitation and assistive technologies · 2026Article
- Enhancing upper limb motor recovery prediction after acute stroke using EEG and subacute data.APL bioengineering · 2026Article
- Beyond proportional recovery in wake-up stroke: unsupervised recovery clusters based on the NIHSS.Journal of neuroengineering and rehabilitation · 2026Article
- A multimodal machine learning approach to forecast upper limb motor recovery after stroke using kinematic and electromyographic data - A pilot-study.Journal of neuroengineering and rehabilitation · 2026Article
- The Effect of Age on Post-Stroke Language Outcomes.Journal of aging research · 2026Article
- Mitigating the impact of motor impairment on self-administered digital tests: a longitudinal cohort study in stroke.EClinicalMedicine · 2025Article
- Article
- Post-stroke spontaneous motor recovery in mice can be predicted from acute-phase local field potential using machine learning.APL bioengineering · 2025Article
- Article
- The impact of pre-stroke formal education on language test performance in aphasic and non-aphasic stroke survivors.Aphasiology · 2025Article
- Clinical and Brain Morphometry Predictors of Deep Brain Stimulation Outcome in Parkinson's Disease.Brain topography · 2024Article
- Data-driven biomarkers better associate with stroke motor outcomes than theory-based biomarkers.Brain communications · 2024Article
- Objectivizing Measures of Post-Stroke Hand Rehabilitation through Multi-Disciplinary Scales.Journal of clinical medicine · 2023Review
8 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The proportional recovery rule asserts that most stroke survivors recover a fixed proportion of lost function. To the extent that this is true, recovery from stroke can be predicted accurately from baseline measures of acute post-stroke impairment alone. Reports that baseline scores explain more than 80%, and sometimes more than 90%, of the variance in the patients' recoveries, are rapidly accumulating. Here, we show that these headline effect sizes are likely inflated. The key effects in this literature are typically expressed as, or reducible to, correlation coefficients between baseline scores and recovery (outcome scores minus baseline scores). Using formal analyses and simulations, we show that these correlations will be extreme when outcomes are significantly less variable than baselines, which they often will be in practice regardless of the real relationship between outcomes and baselines. We show that these effect sizes are likely to be over-optimistic in every empirical study that we found that reported enough information for us to make the judgement, and argue that the same is likely to be true in other studies as well. The implication is that recovery after stroke may not be as proportional as recent studies suggest.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.