Background: Although multidisciplinary rehabilitation programs are commonly used in clinical practice for patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), they are currently underexamined.
Objective: This study aims to investigate the efficacy and underlying brain mechanisms of an inpatient multidisciplinary rehabilitation.
Methods: Twenty-four patients with relapse-onset MS underwent a 4-week personalized inpatient multidisciplinary rehabilitation and three assessment sessions including MRI, clinical, cognitive and motor function evaluation. Twenty-four healthy controls underwent two assessment sessions 4 weeks apart. Test performances were compared using repeated measures ANOVA, Tukey and t tests. A motor sequence learning (MSL) task was presented during fMRI and data were analysed using FSL.
Results: Patients had less perceived fatigue, improved walking speed and quality of life following the rehabilitation, which could be maintained at follow-up 4 weeks after rehabilitation. After rehabilitation, differences in accuracy of the MSL task between groups diminished, indicating an improved performance in patients. Improved accuracy went along with changes of brain activity in the left cerebellum and right frontal lobe post-rehabilitation, which could be maintained at follow-up. No changes between sessions were observed in controls.
Conclusion: Multidisciplinary rehabilitation may improve highly impacting symptoms through more efficient recruitment of brain regions and therefore positively influence MS patients' quality of life.
Keywords: Fatigue; Motor skills; Multidisciplinary rehabilitation; Multiple sclerosis; Quality of life; fMRI.