Cortical connectivity in patients with subcortical stroke

Aims: Functional imaging studies frequently demonstrate that patients suffering from subcortical stroke show relative overactivations in cortical motor areas compared to healthy controls. Such enhanced activity is also found in contralesional motor areas when patients move their paretic hand. Transcranial magnetic stimulation studies suggest that these changes in contralesional areas may reflect inhibitory rather than compensatory mechanisms for the motor output of the lesioned hemisphere. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and dynamic causal modelling (DCM) to assess changes in effective conne…