Shigenobu Ishigami

Current status of rehabilitation medicine in Asia: A report from New Millennium Asian Symposium on Rehabilitation Medicine

With the aim of promoting rehabilitation medicine in Asian countries, where the number of persons with disability occupies a significant proportion in the world, New Millennium Asian Symposium on Rehabilitation Medicine was held in February 2001 in Tokyo, under the sponsorship of the Japanese Association of Rehabilitation Medicine. Twenty-three guest speakers from 14 Asian countries and regions participated in the 2-day meeting. With a structured questionnaire that was sent to the participants beforehand, demographic data related to rehabilitation practice and information on training and certification in rehabilitation medicine in the participating countries were collected, and presented at the meeting. Based on these data, the current status of rehabilitation medicine in Asia was summarized. The symposium marked an important step forward for the promotion of rehabilitation medicine in Asia.

Toward Future Research

Stroke is the number-one disability group with regard to patient numbers and the impact upon health care systems. To improve our management skills and the quality of rehabilitation programs, we need to evaluate our patients objectively and predict their functional outcomes as early and as accurately as possible. In this chapter, the methodological problems related to stroke outcome research and directions for the future are discussed. We need to develop a valid and reliable set of standardized measures of stroke pathology, comorbidity, impairment, disability, handicap, and life satisfaction that could be uniformly and internationally used. Future studies should follow well-designed and standardized protocols including patient selection, measures used, acquisition, management, and analysis of data so that different studies could be compared and conclusions generalized. In addition, international cooperative research would provide us with an unique opportunity to acquire further insight into the problems related to stroke rehabilitation, and refinement of the methodology in this area is needed.