The Association between Axonal Regeneration Inhibitors and Functional Neuroimage/ Prognosis in Stroke Patients

Stroke is the most frequent cause of handicap in Taiwan, most patients need rehabilitation for functional recovery. However, even in the patients with mild to moderate stroke (NIHSS lower than 8), there would be more than 20% having poor neurological outcome (unable to become mRS≦2 after rehabilitation). There are numerous proposed prognostic factors of poor recovery after stroke, but there is neither reliable predicting method nor effective treatment. Our study group recruited 17 patients with acute subcortical lacunar infarction and 28 controls without stroke history for resting state functional MRI. We found that patients who had worse initial functional connectivity of motor executive function network, especially between bilateral primary motor cortex, had less improvement of both network function in MRI and neurological outcome at 3 months after stroke compared to the patients with better initial functional connectivity. Therefore, resting state functional MRI is a potential tool of predicting neurological outcome of stroke. This proposal plans to recruit more participants to validate this important finding as well as estimating the predicting power of neurological outcome in each functional network. In addition, this proposal will explore the genetic and biochemistry mechanisms of motor executive function network integrity, we will focus on the proteins belonging to "axonal regeneration inhibitors" and their association with the functional connectivity of each brain network as well as neurological outcome.