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, May 7, 2012

Early Promise For Stroke Patients Given - levodopa

My god, from Sept. 2001. Thats plenty of time to get this translated into a therapy protocol. Innovative doctors should have been giving this off-label within a year, Never mind my doctor by 2006, no innovation seen there.

http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=48755&CultureCode=en
A preliminary study published in this week’s issue of THE LANCET suggests that the neurotransmitter precursor levodopa used in combination with physiotherapy could improve motor recovery for patients after stroke.
Hemiplegia (paralysis to one side of the body) causes functional disability after stroke. Physiotherapy used to be the only way of improving motor function in such patients. However, administration of amphetamines in addition to exercise has been found to improve motor recovery in animals, probably by increasing the concentration of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine in the central nervous system. Klaus Scheidtmann and colleagues from Bad Aibling Neurological Hospital, Germany, investigated whether levodopa could enhance the efficacy of physiotherapy after hemiplegia.
53 primary stroke patients were assessed in a prospective, randomised study. For the first 3 weeks patients received single doses of 100 mg levodopa or placebo daily in combination with physiotherapy. For the second 3 weeks patients had only physiotherapy. Motor function was assessed every week by Rivermead motor assessment (RMA).
Motor recovery was substantially improved after 3 weeks of drug intervention in patients given levodopa (RMA improved by 6.4 points) compared with placebo (4.1), and the result was independent of initial degree of impairment. The advantage of the levodopa group was maintained 3 weeks after levodopa was stopped. At the end of the study the total RMA score gain for the levodopa group was 8.2 points compared with 5.7 in the placebo group.
Friedemann Müller (one of the investigators) comments: “A single dose of levodopa was well tolerated and, when given in combination with physiotherapy, was found to enhance motor recovery in patients with hemiplegia. This trend should be confirmed, and we need to establish long-term ceiling effects, which our short observation period did not allow us to judge. We should also ascertain to what extent the lesion size and amount of levodopa affect enhanced functional recovery. In view of its minimal side-effects, levodopa will be a possible add- on during stroke rehabilitation.”

In 2009 there was this research:

New step forward for stroke patients

New research will determine whether an inexpensive drug called L-dopa, widely used in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, could also help thousands of stroke patients regain mobility and independence.
The world’s first large scale study of this treatment, led by Professor Bipin Bhakta at the University of Leeds, will investigate whether L-dopa, when used with conventional physiotherapy and occupational therapy, increases the person’s ability to relearn essential day to day activities such as walking and dressing.
Professor Bhakta, head of the Academic Department of Rehabilitation Medicine in the Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine explains: “If an existing and inexpensive drug can help augment the effects of conventional rehabilitation treatments this represents a major step forward in improving stroke recovery.”
He says existing scientific evidence shows that certain nerve pathways in the brain are important in how people learn movement skills. L-dopa may work by enhancing the activity of some of these pathways and by combining the medication with routine rehabilitation treatments there may be an opportunity to increase the effect of our current treatments.