Deans' stroke musings: Acupuncture for treatment of insomnia in patients with traumatic brain injury: a pilot intervention study.

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, April 28, 2012

Acupuncture for treatment of insomnia in patients with traumatic brain injury: a pilot intervention study.

I can't tell from the abstract if the control group had sham acupuncture or not. If not then the acupuncture group could easily be the placebo effect.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21386714

Abstract

OBJECTIVES:

: To assess the efficacy of acupuncture in treating insomnia in traumatic brain injury (TBI) survivors as compared to medication, to determine whether acupuncture has fewer cognitive and affective adverse effects than does medication.

PARTICIPANTS:

: Twenty-four adult TBI survivors, randomized to acupuncture or control arms.

SETTING:

: Outpatient rehabilitation clinic.

MEASURES:

: Insomnia Severity Index (degree of insomnia); actigraphy (sleep time); Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (depression); Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status and Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test (cognitive function) administered at baseline and postintervention.

RESULTS:

: Sleep time did not differ between the treatment and control groups after intervention, whereas cognition improved in the former but not the latter.

CONCLUSION:

: Acupuncture has a beneficial effect on perception of sleep or sleep quality and on cognition in our small sample of patients with TBI. Further studies of this treatment modality are warranted to validate these findings and to explore factors that contribute to treatment efficacy.