A new study by UCLA Health has discovered what researchers say is the first drug to fully reproduce the effects of physical stroke rehabilitation in model mice, following from human studies.
The findings, published in Nature Communications, tested two candidate drugs derived from their studies on the mechanism of the brain effects of rehabilitation, of which one resulted in significant recovery in movement control after stroke in the mouse model.
Stroke is the leading cause of adult disability because most patients do not fully recover from the effects of stroke. There are no drugs in the field of stroke recovery, requiring stroke patients to undergo physical rehabilitation which has shown to be only modestly effective.
The goal is to have a medicine that stroke patients can take that produces the effects of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation after stroke is limited in its actual effects because most patients cannot sustain the rehab intensity needed for stroke recovery.
Further, stroke recovery is not like most other fields of medicine, where drugs are available that treat the disease-such as cardiology, infectious disease or cancer. Rehabilitation is a physical medicine approach that has been around for decades; we need to move rehabilitation into an era of molecular medicine."
Dr. S. Thomas Carmichael, study's lead author and professor and chair of UCLA Neurology
Source:
Journal reference:
Okabe, N., et al. (2025). Parvalbumin interneurons regulate rehabilitation-induced functional recovery after stroke and identify a rehabilitation drug. Nature Communications. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-57860-0.
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