John Krakauer – Clinical Trial

(Photo João Camilo)

 

 

Clinical Trial

You have started a clinical trial using the game on patients very early on after their stroke.

We recruited our first patient sometime in 2015. Now we’re beyond 20 people who have participated in it. It’s ongoing at Columbia University in New York, Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and in Switzerland.

The patients have to be within five weeks of their stroke, they have to do an hour of continuous movement in the morning, an hour of continuous movement in the afternoon, and do it five days a week for three weeks. And each one-hour session of movement probably takes about three hours of being there the room.

That’s another reason why this is not usually attempted: it’s monstrously expensive and logistically difficult to do patient studies of this kind.

Have you obtained results?

The trial is ongoing. There have been some remarkable results, the therapists tell me, but I don’t want to know yet. I really don’t. But I think we might do an interim analysis of the data next year, because we want to do a bigger trial based on this one as pilot data.

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