- Prevention of Muscle Atrophy
- Enhanced Muscle Recruitment
- Recovery of Muscle strength
Muscle strength is extremely important for optimal recovery post operatively or after an injury but we often find that our patients lose a lot of their strength during this time which can slow down their return to function.
It has been shown that the extent of atrophy pre operatively is a predictor of the duration of hospitalisation and subsequent rehabilitation of our patients and therefore limiting this atrophy is extremely important in speeding up recovery times.
Studies have shown that using NMES during periods of immobilisation straight after injury can help reduce the loss of muscle mass, limit muscle breakdown and increase protein synthesis and this in turn should allow quicker and more effective rehab and recovery from injury.
Muscle weakness post operatively can drastically affect our patients’ ability to return to previous levels of activity and sport. It is also thought that patients that have a reduced ability to voluntarily activate their muscles post-surgery can develop chronic strength deficits which can increase their risk of re-injury.
NMES offers a way of overriding voluntary muscle activation deficits and can help restore normal muscle function, therefore limiting muscle atrophy early after surgery. Additionally, adding NMES to a traditional exercise based rehabilitation programme has been shown to increase both muscle strength and muscle mass significantly more quickly than exercise alone. The result of this is that our patients should be able to return to their normal activities far more quickly than if NMES was not utilised.
Despite the name, The Chattanooga Cefar TENS device also offers NMES functions.
