UK Stroke Forum 2025 | Adapting physiotherapy to address post-stroke cognitive impairments
Nele Demeyere, PhD, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, discusses the importance of understanding the complexities of cognitive impairments in patients who have experienced a stroke. Prof. Demeyere emphasizes the need for physiotherapists to adapt their therapy sessions according to the specific cognitive impairments of their patients, but notes that the current evidence base for such adaptations is limited. This interview took place at the UK Stroke Forum (UKSF) 2025 Conference in Aberdeen, UK.
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Transcript
Yes, so the talk I gave today was a session specifically aimed at allied health professionals, in particular physiotherapists, and the main aim of the talk was to give a little bit of an overview of different aspects of cognition, because sometimes cognition kind of gets treated as like only just one thing, but actually, it can consist of quite domain-specific problems, so we explained what we mean by that, so the very focal issues like neglect and apraxia, as well as some more domain-general problems, so often more related to overall brain health and what we would call something more global cognition things like executive functioning...
Yes, so the talk I gave today was a session specifically aimed at allied health professionals, in particular physiotherapists, and the main aim of the talk was to give a little bit of an overview of different aspects of cognition, because sometimes cognition kind of gets treated as like only just one thing, but actually, it can consist of quite domain-specific problems, so we explained what we mean by that, so the very focal issues like neglect and apraxia, as well as some more domain-general problems, so often more related to overall brain health and what we would call something more global cognition things like executive functioning. And then followed on with some of the kind of transient impairments, a delirium, which my colleague Terry Quinn had just introduced in the previous talk. So it was providing a bit of an overview about thinking, what is it you’re assessing for when you assess cognition, and how would that impact knowing that someone has got a particular type of cognitive impairment, how does that impact and how you would then adapt your therapy sessions with them. Yeah, this is one of the aspects that we talked about as well, which is very difficult, because the evidence base is actually quite poor on how to adapt, because a lot of the research base that is looking at these interventions for physiotherapy tend to use only people that have no cognitive impairments, so actually, part of the talk ended up being a call to action to make sure that we actually get more evidence on specific tailoring, what that specific tailoring should look like, because at the moment it’s much more clinical feeling than it is strong evidence-based, so that’s that’s some work to be done.
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