On the importance of long-term functional assessment after stroke to improve translation from bench to bedside

Regarding functional evaluations, the first point to consider is the body weight. Monitoring body weight changes after a stroke is of prime importance since postoperative weight loss may indicate feeding difficulties. Aside from all ethical considerations, such postoperative weight loss has been shown by some authors to be correlated with the extent of the lesion (extensive corticostriatal damage [1], or the involvement of the external carotid artery territory in the lesion [2]). An easy measurement such as this can advise as to the severity of the lesion. Beyond the lesion per se, feeding difficulties may also result from a reduced consciousness level or poor mobility due to anesthesia and/or surgery. For example, a surgical approach in which the temporal muscle is injured, such as the Tamura model [3] may induce severe mastication impairments, resulting thus in higher body weight loss. Nevertheless, a poor nutritional intake (Dennis, 2000) can be a bias, since it has been shown in patients [2] as in animals to have a negative effect on functional outcomes after stroke [2]. Body weight monitoring of patients has even been recommended as an index of functional outcome [4]. Thus, investigating weight changes in preclinical studies has to be recommended for all authors in the field, since it gives an independent and unambiguous assessment of animal welfare and safety. Animals should be weighed at least once before surgery and then regularly after. This parameter, accessible to everyone and not only to behaviorists since it does not require any specific skill, can also give, in some ways, information on how animals recover from surgery and can even be a prognostic index for functional outcome.Concerning functional evaluations, few studies consider crucial long-term evaluation, even though it has been highly recommended during the Stroke Therapy Academic Industry Roundtables [5-7]. As in clinical practice [8], animals display a large degree of spontaneous recovery withi