In Europe, every year 1.5 million new patients suffer from a stroke with a large part of them being significantly impaired from motor, language and other symptoms. Despite the recent developments in acute stroke therapy (e.g., thrombolysis, thrombectomy, stroke units) still less than 15% of the patients recover to a degree that they get back to normal life. This makes stroke the main course of long-term disability with major impact on patients’ professional and private life, the health systems and socio-economics. Thus, there is a strong need for novel, innovative treatment strategies to enhance significantly the magnitude of functional recovery to bring more patients back to normal life. Innovative treatment strategies, such as noninvasive brain stimulation (NIBS), have demonstrated promising results in proof-of-principle studies [1Hummel F.C., Celnik P., Giraux P., Floel A., Wu W.H., Gerloff C., e al. Effects of noninvasive cortical stimulation on skilled motor function in chronic stroke Brain 2005 ;  128 : 490-499 [cross-ref]

Cliccare qui per andare alla sezione Riferimenti, 2Hummel F.C., Cohen L.G. Noninvasive brain stimulation: a novel strategy to enhance functional recovery? Lancet Neurol 2006 ;  5 : 708-712 [inter-ref]

Cliccare qui per andare alla sezione Riferimenti, 3Wessel M., Zimerman M., Hummel F.C. Noninvasive brain stimulation and motor skill acquisition: enhancing behavioural training after stroke – a review Front Hum Neurosci 2015 ;  9 : 265

Cliccare qui per andare alla sezione Riferimenti]. However, the treatment responses to NIBS are not satisfying yet, as their magnitude is heterogeneous, with responders and non-responders. One reason might be that NIBS-based interventions are used in ‘one suits all’ approaches independent of the characteristics and requirements of the individual patients. Based on the fact that the population of stroke patients is quite heterogeneous in relation to e.g., lesion location, lesion size, course of recovery, initial deficit, functional and structural pre-requisites beyond others, ‘one suits all’ seems not to be the most promising approach. Thus, to achieve much better treatment effects, there might be a need for a paradigm shift from imprecision ‘one suits all’ treatment strategies towards patient-tailored precision medicine approaches. In the present talk, these issues will be discussed in more detail and potential approaches towards NIBS-based patient-tailored treatment interventions to achieve homogenous treatment responses with maximized effects will be introduced.