Among medical specialties, rehabilitation has been one of the slowest to develop a basic science framework and to establish evidence-based practices as its norms. The reasons for this relate in part to the urgent need for clinical service and the dearth of experienced practitioners in the field during its formative years. It is imperative now, that the perceived lack of a scientific basis be reversed in order for rehabilitation medicine to achieve its full academic recognition and fulfill its great potential for relieving human suffering. This book represents an attempt to place the practice of neurorehabilitation in a rigorous scientific framework. Precisely because the need and the potential are so great, the editors have devoted equal space and emphasis to the clinical practice of neurorehabilitation and to its basic science underpinnings. In particular, two areas of basic science are highlighted – neuroplasticity and neural repair. In this respect, the book differs from most clinical textbooks. However, the professional neurorehabilitation community has been especially supportive of this direction and has taken very active steps to further the development of a basic scientific underpinning for its field. Similarly, the field of rehabilitation medicine, and in particular neurorehabilitation, has begun to put great emphasis on the development of evidence-based medical practices (DeLisa et al., 1999; Ottenbacher and Maas, 1999; Practice PPoE-B, 2001). The chapters in the clinical sections of this book stress those therapies for which evidence exists based on controlled clinical trials.

Neurorehabilitation is a medical specialty that is growing rapidly because medical advances have extended life expectancy and saved the lives of persons who previously would not have survived neurological injury. It is now urgent to develop a rigorous scientific basis for the field. The basic science relevant to functional recovery from neural injury is perhaps the most exciting and compelling of all the medical sciences. It encompasses areas of plasticity, regeneration and transplantation in the nervous system that individually have been the subjects of many monographs. With the Textbook of Neural Repair and Rehabilitation, these areas are integrated with each other and with the clinical topics to which they apply.

The Textbook of Neural Repair and Rehabilitation is organized into two volumes. Volume I: Neural Repair and Plasticity can stand alone as a textbook for graduate- or advanced undergraduate-level courses on recovery from neural injury. It is subdivided into two sections: A: Neural Plasticity and B: Neural Repair. Following an injury to the nervous system, most patients partially regain function. Section A: Neural Plasticity, addresses the mechanisms that underlie spontaneous recovery as well as the added recovery induced by therapies based on use, retraining and pharmacologic manipulations. The chapters cover the anatomical and physiologic responses of neurons to injury, mechanisms of learning and memory, and plasticity in specific areas of the nervous system consequent to intense use, disuse and injury. Ultimately, interventions aimed at repairing the damaged neural circuitry will be required if full function is to be restored.