TY  - JOUR
AU  - Karaganova, Irina
AU  - Mindova, Stefka
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/23
TI  - Physical Therapy for Motor and Functional Recovery After Encephalitis: A Narrative Review and Conceptual Rehabilitation Framework
JO  - OBM Neurobiology
SP  - 356
VL  - 10
IS  - 04
AB  - Encephalitis can cause persistent motor, cognitive, behavioral, and participation restrictions. This narrative review synthesizes the available rehabilitation literature and develops a clinically oriented, phase-specific conceptual framework for post-encephalitis physical therapy. The framework supports individualized decision-making and future prospective validation; it is not presented as a validated clinical protocol. PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science were searched for English-language publications from January 2010 to October 2025. Encephalitis concepts were combined with rehabilitation, physical therapy, motor recovery, functional outcome, gait, balance, and task-oriented training using AND and OR. Eligible clinical evidence comprised randomized and non-randomized studies, observational cohorts, case series, and case reports reporting motor or functional outcomes. Reviews and other publications were retained separately as contextual sources. We synthesized the evidence descriptively and used it to inform framework development. Eighteen clinical reports meeting the physical therapy-specific eligibility criteria and reporting measurable motor or functional outcomes were included in the descriptive clinical evidence set: 4 cohort studies, 4 case series, and 10 case reports. Five reports identified during full-text screening as primarily cognitive rehabilitation, dysphagia/swallowing rehabilitation, or general clinical-outcome reports without a sufficiently characterized physical therapy intervention were not included in the physical therapy evidence set. Reports without rehabilitation exposure, reports concerning encephalopathy rather than encephalitis, and conference abstracts were also excluded from the intervention evidence set. No randomized controlled trial specifically evaluating physical therapy after encephalitis was identified. We retained additional reviews and broader neurorehabilitation sources only for contextualization and framework development. Four studies provided sufficiently explicit admission-to-discharge data for a limited semi-quantitative summary; heterogeneity precluded pooling. The available evidence suggests that early, individualized, task-oriented physical therapy may contribute to motor and functional recovery after encephalitis when integrated within multidisciplinary rehabilitation. Because the evidence is heterogeneous and largely observational, the proposed framework should be regarded as hypothesis-generating and clinically informative rather than as evidence of established efficacy. Prospective studies are needed to evaluate its feasibility, safety, and effectiveness.
SN  - 2573-4407
UR  - https://doi.org/10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2604356
DO  - 10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2604356
ID  - Karaganova2026
ER  -