Effects of body-oriented intervention after stroke on cognitive function, body awareness, and quality of life: A systematic review

Background: Some cognitive functions can be affected by a stroke as it causes sensory, perceptual, and visual deficits, contributing to a loss of body awareness and changes in one's body image and leading to a decrease in the quality of life (QoL). This systematic review aims to identify and systematize scientific evidence of bodyoriented intervention (BOI) effects in adult and elderly patients after a stroke on cognitive function, body awareness, and QoL. Methods: The research was carried out in: Pubmed, Science Direct, Cochrane, Web of Science, Psycinfo, Scopus, Portal Regional da BVS, and PEDro. To assess the methodological quality of the studies, the PEDro scale was used, and best evidence synthesis (BES) was performed on the data. Results: The study included 11 high-quality randomized controlled trials involving 590 participants. The trials investigated BOIs' effects, focusing on creative arts and mind-body and evaluating cognitive functions, body awareness, and QoL. BOIs were evidenced to induce positive effects, limited to strong ones, on several cognitive outcomes and QoL indicators, with more benefits than, or similar amounts of benefits to, other therapies. Conclusions: BOIs have been shown to be a valid therapy in stroke recovery as there is limited to strong evidence that they improve several cognitive functions and QoL, with similar benefits to or more benefits than other therapies. In the future, it is important to study the outcomes that were not explored by the included studies or that have hardly been investigated, such as those related to body awareness.