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.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Study looks at the nature of change in our aging, changing brains

If you are curious as to how the aging brain works. Or you could read the book;
The secret life of the grown-up brain : the surprising talents of the middle-aged mind / Barbara Strauch

http://www.unknownbody.com/neuroscience/memory/14235-study-looks-at-the-nature-of-change-in-our-aging-changing-brains.html
As we get older, our cognitive abilities change, improving when we're younger and declining as we age. Scientists posit a hierarchical structure within which these abilities are organized. There's the "lowest" level -- measured by specific tests, such as story memory or word memory; the second level, which groups various skills involved in a category of cognitive ability, such as memory, perceptual speed, or reasoning; and finally, the "general," or G, factor, a sort of statistical aggregate of all the thinking abilities.

What happens to this structure as we age? That was the question Timothy A. Salthouse, Brown-Forman professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, investigated in a new study appearing in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. His findings advance psychologists' understanding of the complexities of the aging brain.

"There are three hypotheses about how this works," says Salthouse. "One is that abilities become more strongly integrated with one another as we age." That theory suggests the general factor influences cognitive aging the most. The second -- based on the idea that connectivity among different brain regions lessens with age -- "is almost the opposite: that the changes in cognitive abilities become more rather than less independent with age." The third was Salthouse's hypothesis: The structure remains constant throughout the aging process.

Using a sample of 1,490 healthy adults ages 18 to 89, Salthouse performed analyses of the scores on 16 tests of five cognitive abilities -- vocabulary, reasoning, spatial relations, memory, and perceptual speed. The primary analyses were on the changes in the test scores across an interval of about two and a half years.

The findings confirmed Salthouse's hunch: "The effects of aging on memory, on reasoning, on spatial relations, and so on are not necessarily constant. But the structure within which these changes are occurring does not seem to change as a function of age." In normal, healthy people, "the direction and magnitude of change may be different" when we're 18 or 88, he says. "But it appears that the qualitative nature of cognitive change remains the same throughout adulthood."

The study could inform other research investigating "what allows some people to age more gracefully than others," says Salthouse. That is, do people who stay mentally sharper maintain their ability structures better than those who become more forgetful or less agile at reasoning? And in the future, applying what we know about the structures of change could enhance "interventions that we think will improve cognitive functioning" at any age or stage of life.

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