The Brief Kinesthesia test is feasible and sensitive: a study in stroke

BACKGROUND: Clinicians lack a quantitative measure of kinesthetic sense, an important contributor to sensorimotor control of the hand and arm. OBJECTIVES: The objective here was to determine the feasibility of administering the Brief Kinesthesia Test (BKT) and begin to validate it by 1) reporting BKT scores from persons with chronic stroke and a healthy comparison group and 2) examining the relationship between the BKT scores and other valid sensory and motor measures. METHOD: Adults with stroke and mild to moderate hemiparesis (N=12) and an age-, gender-, and handedness-matched healthy comparison group (N=12) completed the BKT by reproducing three targeted reaching movements per hand with vision occluded. OTHER MEASURES: the Hand Active Sensation Test (HASTe), Touch-Test((tm)) monofilament aesthesiometer, 6-item Wolf Motor Function Test (Wolf), the Motor Activity Log (MAL), and the Box and Blocks Test (BBT). A paired t-test compared BKT scores between groups. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients assessed the relationship between BKT scores and other measures. RESULTS: Post-stroke participants performed more poorly on the BKT than comparison participants with their contralesional and ipsilesional upper extremity. The mean difference for the contralesional upper extremity was 3.7 cm (SE=1.1, t=3.34; p<0.008). The BKT score for the contralesional limb was strongly correlated with the MAL-how much (r=0.84, p=0.001), the MAL-how well (r=0.76, p=0.007), Wolf (r=0.69, p=0.02), and the BBT (r=0.77, p=0.006). CONCLUSIONS: The BKT was feasible to administer and sensitive to differences in reaching accuracy between persons with stroke and a comparison group. With further refinement, The BKT may become a valuable clinical measure of post-stroke kinesthetic impairment.