Maraviroc to Augment Rehabilitation Outcomes After Stroke

After stroke, the combination of progressive skills practice in an adequate dose, exercise for fitness, and reduced sedentary time will augment motor and cognitive outcomes. Sensorimotor and cognitive improvements after stroke often reach a general plateau by approximately 12 weeks after onset, however. Drugs that might enhance learning or neural repair, as well as other molecular and synaptic adaptations that occur during skills training and fitness exercise, might extend that recovery curve, although to date only fluoxetine has given any hint of this. Most trials have tested agents that modulate neurotransmitters. Several very recent preclinical experiments and observational studies in patients after stroke suggest that the commercially available medication, Maraviroc, a CCR5 antagonist, may augment skills learning during rehabilitation training, especially during the first three months after onset, by affecting CREB and synaptic plasticity. The investigators will carry out a randomized controlled trial of Maraviroc in patients with disabilities severe enough to have required inpatient stroke rehabilitation and, based on our preclinical data, who can start the drug intervention within 6 weeks of stroke onset. The investigators will compare usual post-stroke care plus placebo versus Maraviroc given for 8 weeks in 60 participants. However, to try to maximize the amount of practice that is most relevant to the primary outcome measurements and determine whether or not Maraviroc can enhance the effects of training, as hypothesized, all participants will be tele-monitored by mobile health devices and will receive weekly telephonic encouragement, based on device data, to walk, reduce sedentary time, and reach and grasp in the home in between usual care therapies. Compliance, serial motor changes over time, and self-management skills in making use of the telerehabilitation devices will be a nested substudy of feasibility of remote monitoring and feedback.