Deans' stroke musings: A Randomized Controlled Trial Comparing 2 Interventions for Visual Field Loss With Standard Occupational Therapy During Inpatient Stroke Rehabilitatio

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Monday, December 5, 2011

A Randomized Controlled Trial Comparing 2 Interventions for Visual Field Loss With Standard Occupational Therapy During Inpatient Stroke Rehabilitatio

The last line in this abstract should have been considered before going thru this research.
http://nnr.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/12/01/1545968311425927.abstract

Abstract

Background and Purpose. Compensatory and restorative treatments have been developed to improve visual field defects after stroke. However, no controlled trials have compared these interventions with standard occupational therapy (OT). Methods. A total of 45 stroke participants with visual field defect admitted for inpatient rehabilitation were randomized to restorative computerized training (RT) using computer-based stimulation of border areas of their visual field defects or to a computer-based compensatory therapy (CT) teaching a visual search strategy. OT, in which different compensation strategies were used to train for activities of daily living, served as standard treatment for the active control group. Each treatment group received 15 single sessions of 30 minutes distributed over 3 weeks. The primary outcome measures were visual field expansion for RT, visual search performance for CT, and reading performance for both treatments. Visual conjunction search, alertness, and the Barthel Index were secondary outcomes. Results. Compared with OT, CT resulted in a better visual search performance, and RT did not result in a larger expansion of the visual field. Intragroup pre–post comparisons demonstrated that CT improved all defined outcome parameters and RT several, whereas OT only improved one. Conclusions. CT improved functional deficits after visual field loss compared with standard OT and may be the intervention of choice during inpatient rehabilitation. A larger trial that includes lesion location in the analysis is recommended.