Deans' stroke musings: Recovery From Poststroke Visual Impairment: Evidence From a Clinical Trials Resource

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.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Recovery From Poststroke Visual Impairment: Evidence From a Clinical Trials Resource

See how long you know about this before your doctor mentions it to you, and then how long till it gets incorporated into your stroke protocol.
http://nnr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/27/2/133?etoc

Abstract

Introduction. Limited evidence suggests that visual impairments may influence outcome after stroke. The degree of recovery from these impairments is poorly characterized. Objectives. To describe recovery and to determine whether visual impairments influence functional outcome and quality of life. Methods. We extracted demographic and outcome data from the Virtual International Stroke Trials Archive (VISTA). We examined horizontal eye movement disorders and hemianopia using the Best Gaze and Visual domains of the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) and described recovery at 30 and 90 days. Proportional odds modelling was used to examine the association between impairments at baseline, modified Rankin Scale (mRS), and European Quality of Life Score (EQ-5D) at 90 days. Results. Visual impairments were reported in 7,204/11,900 (60.5%) patients at baseline. Complete recovery occurred in 1,398/3,285 (42.6%) and 3,243/7,204 (45.0%) patients by 30 and 90 days respectively. The burden of persistent visual impairment in survivors was 1,135/4,028 (28.2%) at 30 days and 1,915/9,338 (20.5%) at 90 days. Partial gaze palsy (P less than .0001; OR = 0.81; 95% CI = 0.74-0.87), forced deviation (P less than .0001; OR = 0.48; 95% CI = 0.43-0.53), and complete homonymous hemianopia (P less than .0001; OR = 0.67; 95% CI = 0.62-0.73) at baseline were associated with poor mRS at 90 days. Conclusions. The rate of recovery was greater in the first month after stroke, suggesting a potential time frame for interventions. The associations between visual impairments and poor mRS suggest that these impairments should be considered in multidisciplinary assessments and interventions.