Posted on February 7, 2002 at 10:30 a.m.

BIRMINGHAM, AL — UAB’s (University of Alabama at Birmingham) novel stroke rehabilitation therapy will be featured as part of a five-part television series on the brain on PBS. "The Secret Life of the Brain" has been airing on PBS stations across the country in January and February. The fifth and final hour, called “The Aging Brain: Through Many Lives,” featuring UAB’s therapy, airs Tuesday, February 12 at 8 p.m. CST.

Constraint-Induced Movement (CI) Therapy was developed by UAB professor of psychology Edward Taub, Ph.D. Taub has shown that intense, repetitive physical therapy following stroke can create a re-wiring in the brain, allowing stroke patients to regain functional use of an arm or leg affected by a stroke.

Patients spend two weeks in Taub’s laboratory, where they perform taxing physical therapy training with their affected arms for six to eight hours a day, forcing renewed stimulation to the previously unused areas of the brain. Each patient’s unaffected hand is constrained in a sling or other device to prevent its use. As a result, a second, massive cortical reorganization begins to take place as the brain once again receives signals from the affected arm, triggering new connections.

Taub says CI therapy could bring renewed function to 75 percent of all stroke patients Preliminary studies suggest that CI therapy could also help patients with traumatic brain injury, spinal cord damage, and fractured hips.

The five-part "Secret Life of the Brain" series was produced by David Grubin Productions. The Aging Brain was written and produced by Edward Gray. Gray and his production crew spent a week at UAB in 2001 documenting CI Therapy and meeting and interviewing stroke patients whose lives had been changed by the therapy.