The Effect of Kinetic Dance Training in Brachial Artery Flow-Mediated Dilatation After Chronic Stroke

Flow-mediated dilatation (FMD) is a strong predictor for the future cardiovascular event and plays a role in cardiovascular health. Brachial FMD is impaired after a chronic stroke. Aerobic exercise training improves the vascular health and FMD. We investigated the effect of kinetic dance training by using video game Xbox on brachial artery FMD in patient with chronic stroke. The aim of the study is 1) to investigate the effects of kinetic dance training for six weeks on brachial artery FMD in patients with chronic stroke, 2) To compare the effects of our training in patients with chronic stroke to healthy age-matched control. We hypothesized that 1) six weeks of kinetic dance training with the Xbox video game would improve brachial artery FMD in patients with chronic stroke in comparison to healthy age-matched control group. 2) six weeks of kinetic dance training would lower resting heart, resting blood pressure, and improve blood flow velocity in the brachial artery. Our primary outcome measure is FMD although we include heart rate, BP, and flow velocity. We recruited a total of 11(N=11) patients with chronic stroke who underwent six weeks of dance training compared to a healthy age-matched control group. The training protocol was a kinetic dance for six weeks. In the first two weeks the training was 5 sessions/week, 38.6 min/session., in week 2-3 the training was 5 sessions/week, 45.5 mins/session, and in week 5-6 the training was 2 Sessions/week, 52.42 minutes/ session. Our results showed that kinetic dance training improves brachial artery FMD after two weeks 14.9% and six weeks of training 32.88% in patients with chronic stroke. The brachial artery FMD in patients with chronic stroke was impaired and significantly lower before the training (5.81%±1.62) in comparison to healthy age-matched control (7.62%± 1.65) (P=0.01). However, this impairment was revised after six weeks of training to improve the brachial artery FMD (7.92±2.06) to be not significantly different from age-matched control (7.62±1.65) who did not receive training (P=0.81). Our finding suggests the effectiveness of the kinetic dance training to improve brachial artery FMD in patients with chronic stroke after six weeks of training.