Foot Drop

Most patients who survive a stroke will go on to experience permanent physical disabilities. These disabilities will often result in a deviation of the patient’s ability to properly ambulate. One very common gait deviation that is displayed by these patients is known as “foot-drop.” Foot-drop is the result of weakness or damage to the common peroneal nerve or a paralysis of the tibialis anterior muscle causing an inability to dorsiflex the foot during the swing phase of gait. This results in the patient having to clear the toes of the effected foot by using some type of compensatory motion of the legs or hips. There are a number of techniques that can be used to help to reduce the effects of foot-drop, one of the oldest and most common being
Hausdorff, PhD to take a look at more of the long term effects of FES on foot drop. The examiners had noticed that most of the studies done on FES dealt with gait velocity and energy expenditure while testing patients in a closed environment over a ten-meter distance and only took place over the course of a few months. This doesn’t accurately represent the difficulties of functional ambulation and doesn’t take in to account the long term effects of FES. They instead intended to explore the short and long term effects of FES on foot drop after its daily application for two weeks and then one year and also to assess the carryover effect that the application of FES had after one year when the patients were tested without assistance of its stimulation. There were sixteen subjects chosen ranging in ages from twenty-eight to seventy-six years old. Some prerequisites for these patients are that they had to have had hemiparesis for greater than six months, not have spasticity in their plantar flexors greater than four on the Modified Ashworth Scale and score at least 23/30 on the Mini Mental State Exam. Each patient was tested three times starting before the fitting of the prosthesis, two months after and then one year after. At the initial evaluation they were evaluated without the AFO or the FES. At the two-month evaluation they were evaluated with just the FES and at the final one-year evaluation they were assessed with the FES and then without any device to test for potential carryover. There were a number of tests that the participants went through at each evaluation. One of them was a ten-meter gait velocity test which was measured in meters per second over a ten-meter distance. This was done on a flat smooth surface and also on a carpeted surface. Another was a six-minute velocity test where the subjects walked as far as they could in six minutes, walking