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.

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Common Medicine Helps Repair Brain After Stroke, Study in Rats Suggests

Ibuprofen. I wonder how many doctors will try this in patients before human trials are proven. Ask your ER doctor
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121003111153.htm
Strokes often cause loss or impairment of vital brain functions -- such as speech, movement, vision or attention. Restoration of these functions is often possible, but difficult. One of the factors impeding brain plasticity is inflammation. A study on rats, carried out at the Nencki Institute in Warsaw, suggests that effectiveness of neurorehabilitation after a stroke can be improved by anti-inflammatory drugs.

Post-stroke inflammation slows down recovery and impairs brain plasticity, reveal the results from the lab of Professor Małgorzata Kossut at the Nencki Institute in Warsaw. The popular anti-inflammatory drug ibuprofen restores the ability of brain cortex to reorganize -- a process necessary for recovery of stroke-damaged functions.
"Our research was conducted on rats, but we have good reasons to suppose that in future our results will help improve effectiveness of rehabilitation of stroke patients," says Prof. Kossut.
The Nencki Institute team stresses that so far there are no proofs that the treatment will be effective in humans and that they did not investigate if the ibuprofen therapy prevents strokes, but concentrated on post-stroke recovery.
The most frequent cause of stroke is blocking of brain arteries. Without supply of oxygen, neurons die quickly. In the region of stroke-induced damage pathological changes cause decrease of brain tissue metabolism, impairment of neurotransmission and edema.
Brain control over physiological and voluntary functions may be lost, depending on the localization of the infarct. Impairments of movement, vision, speech and attention are frequent. In most cases these functions return either partially or completely. Sometimes they return spontaneously, more often after neurorehabilitation.
"In both instances recovery is based on neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to reorganize, that is to change the properties of neurons and to alter the connections between them," says Dr. Monika Liguz-Lęcznar (Nencki Institute).
After a stroke, neuroplasticity is impaired. Scientists from the Nencki Institute suppose that this may be due to inflammation developing at the site of the stroke. The proof that decreasing inflammation helps neurorehabilitation came from experiments done on rats with experimentally induced stroke. The stroke was localized in a special region of the brain cortex, receiving information from whiskers.
The whiskers are important sensory organs of rodents, allowing the animals to orient themselves in their environment in darkness. Every whisker activates a small, precisely delineated chunk of brain cortex.
In healthy rats neuroplastic changes can be induced by cutting off some of the whiskers, that is by eliminating part of the sensory input to the brain. The brain reacts to that by letting the remaining whiskers take over more cortical space, expand their cortical representation, at the expense of the cut off ones.
"This plastic change does not occur when the site of stroke-induced damage is near the region of cortex 'belonging' to the whiskers. We showed that application of ibuprofen decreases inflammation and restores neuroplasticity -- the brain cortex reorganizes like in healthy animals," says Prof. Kossut.
The result obtained on rats indicates that ibuprofen (and probably other anti-inflammatory medicines) may be beneficial in treating stroke patients. Ibuprofen therapy should support brain plasticity by reducing post-stroke inflammation and so speed up recovery of functions lost due to the stroke. If the results on rats are verified in a proper clinical trial, they may be influential in shaping the treatment of stroke patients.
The research of Prof. Kossut's team on the effects of anti-inflammatory drugs on neuroplasticity was funded by the Polish-German Cooperation Program in Neuroscience and grants from the Ministry of Science and Education.


2 comments:

  1. Hmmm, I was told never to take Ibuprofen again.

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    1. That was probably an outdated view and cya behavior

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