On 2014 Feb 12, Hilda Bastian commented:

It would be wonderful if as many post-stroke therapies were as effective, and the evidence for them as strong, as this review concludes. Unfortunately, that's not the case.

The abstract of this review talks about trials in over 25,000 patients - but it doesn't point out that the numbers for individual interventions is, with only some exceptions, small. The review has several major flaws, in particular having no protocol to guard against problems caused by multiple testing and subgroup analyses. Crossover trials are pooled with parallel trials, and the effect of this on the various analyses is not clear: methodological characteristics of the individual trials are not reported. A scoring method is used for the individual trials, for which only the summary score is available.

In addition, it's important to note that the search for this review was done in June of 2011. As well as using more robust methods, other reviews are significantly more up-to-date, e.g. systematic reviews on treadmills (Mehrholz J, 2014) and physical fitness training (Saunders DH, 2013).

Although this review's abstract and conclusions are strongly positive about 30 interventions they consider, the authors do point out in the discussion that: "well controlled, dose-matched trials with significant effects in favor of the experimental intervention have been rather scarce."

For a good overview to consider alongside well-conducted recent systematic reviews, see Langhorne P, 2011.

On 2014 Feb 12, Hilda Bastian commented:

It would be wonderful if as many post-stroke therapies were as effective, and the evidence for them as strong, as this review concludes. Unfortunately, that's not the case.

The abstract of this review talks about trials in over 25,000 patients - but it doesn't point out that the numbers for individual interventions is, with only some exceptions, small. The review has several major flaws, in particular having no protocol to guard against problems caused by multiple testing and subgroup analyses. Crossover trials are pooled with parallel trials, and the effect of this on the various analyses is not clear: methodological characteristics of the individual trials are not reported. A scoring method is used for the individual trials, for which only the summary score is available.

In addition, it's important to note that the search for this review was done in June of 2011. As well as using more robust methods, other reviews are significantly more up-to-date, e.g. systematic reviews on treadmills (Mehrholz J, 2014) and physical fitness training (Saunders DH, 2013).

Although this review's abstract and conclusions are strongly positive about 30 interventions they consider, the authors do point out in the discussion that: "well controlled, dose-matched trials with significant effects in favor of the experimental intervention have been rather scarce."

For a good overview to consider alongside well-conducted recent systematic reviews, see Langhorne P, 2011.