The role of ipsilateral motor areas for movement control is not yet fully understood. The relevance of these areas to the recovery of motor function following a brain lesion is a matter of dispute. It has recently been stated that increased ipsilateral activation following brain damage is maladaptive and hindering the process of recovery. Others have presented evidence that ipsilateral motor ar...

A concept in Parkinson's disease postulates that motor cortex may pattern abnormal rhythmic activities in the basal ganglia, underlying the genesis of observed motor symptoms. We conducted a preclinical study of electrical interference in the primary motor cortex using a chronic MPTP primate model in which dopamine depletion was progressive and regularly documented using 18F-DOPA positron tomog...

Fine motor skills are learned through repetitive practice and once learned, last for a long time. Skilled reaching is linked to structural and functional changes in multiple brain regions including, in particular, the primary motor cortex. Previous studies demonstrated that fine motor skill learning is associated with cortical synaptogenesis and motor map reorganization. At present, studies hav...

Movement-related brain activation patterns after subcortical stroke are characterized by relative overactivations in cortical motor areas compared with controls. In patients able to perform a motor task, overactivations are greater in those with more motor impairment. We hypothesized that recruitment of motor regions would shift from primary to secondary motor networks in response to impaired f...

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder characterized by cortical and spinal motor neuron dysfunction. Routine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies have previously shown hypointense signal in the motor cortex on T(2)-weighted images in some ALS patients, however, the cause of this finding is unknown. To investigate the utility of this MR signal change...

Previous studies have shown that motor recovery of stroke can be assessed by the cortical activity and the structural integrity of the corticospinal tract (CST), but little is known about the relation between the cortical activity and the structural integrity during motor recovery. In the present study, we investigated the changes in brain activities evoked by twenty days' functional electrical...