Galvanic vestibular stimulation reveals disruption of ipsilesional brainstem pathways in hemiparetic stroke survivors

The spatiotemporal structure of muscle coordination emerges from the collaboration and competition among cortical, brainstem and spinal pathways onto motor neuron pools, each continuously shaped by task demands, limb position and descending tract integrity. Here, we used galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) to investigate whether brainstem vestibular output is disrupted in stroke survivors with right hemiparesis (n = 14) compared with age-matched control subjects (n = 14). We estimated this via intermuscular coherence among neck and arm muscles during both rest and a reaching-like (i.e., reaching) movement with the shoulder in neutral and abducted positions, each with no stimulation, sham stimulation or GVS. Previous work showed that young adults exhibit increased coherence between neck muscles with GVS at rest, as do our control subjects. Surprisingly, we saw the same pattern in stroke survivors only on their paretic side, with reduced coherence in their non-paretic side. During reaching, the paretic side did not show changes in coherence between arm or neck muscles, in comparison to control subjects, with and without GVS, and importantly, even lower coherence with the abducted shoulder. Given that GVS did not exacerbate intermuscular coherence in any muscle pair during the reaching tasks and that coherence was even reduced during shoulder abduction, our findings provide evidence to exclude increased brainstem vestibular output as a dominant contributor to pathological synergies during voluntary movement following stroke. In addition, the decreased coherence between neck muscles of the non-paretic side during GVS at rest suggests changes in ipsilesional brainstem vestibular output. This highlights opportunities to consider unexplored contralesional brainstem-spinal pathways, in addition to downregulated ipsilesional vestibular projections, in neurorehabilitation strategies following stroke.