And another down under breakthrough. It would at least be an objective way to determine if you have had a stroke. So ask your ER department when they are going to get this. It still would need work to distinguish between hemorrhagic and ischemic, but its a start.
http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20130401-23936.html
The test requires patients to look into a device for about ten
minutes, enabling it to be used in the early stages of a stroke – even
if the patient cannot move their limbs or speak.
This can help doctors diagnose and treat the stroke quickly and
accurately, which is vital, as early treatment can greatly improve a
person’s chances of survival and recovery, say Dr Corinne Carle and
Professor Ted Maddess from The Vision Centre and The Australian National
University.
According to the World Health Organisation, stroke is currently the
world’s sixth commonest cause of death, accounting for 4.9% of all
fatalities. In Australia it kills about 9000 people a year and
hospitalises 35,000.
“Our new test automatically tracks the response of the patient’s eye
pupils to different colours, and can show doctors whether the injury is
located in the evolutionarily ‘new brain’ or the ‘old brain’,” Dr Carle
says.
“The distinction is important because the ‘old brain’, or midbrain,
controls things like the heart rate and blood pressure of the body. So
if you find that the midbrain has been damaged, you’ll need to treat the
patient much more aggressively, because there’s a higher risk of
death.”
On the other hand, an injury in the ‘new brain’ – the cortex – may
cause permanent blindness in a part of the person’s visual field, or
difficulty in their thoughts, speech and movement, but has a lower risk
of death, she says.
Using the TrueField Analyzer, a device developed by Prof Maddess’
Vision Centre team and the Australian company Seeing Machines, the
researchers tested how the pupils respond to images on LCD screens. A
mixture of red, green and yellow coloured stimuli were provided to each
eye, at 24 locations in the person’s visual field.
Two video cameras using infrared lighting recorded the instant response of the pupils, which was then analysed by a computer.
The colours red, green and yellow were chosen because they are
processed by different parts of the brain, Dr Carle explains. In
mammals, the cortex, or ‘new brain’, is the most recently evolved area,
and allows humans to differentiate between red and green.
The ‘ancient’ midbrain, on the other hand, is red-green colourblind, but can detect the colour yellow.
“If the pupils don’t react when red changes to green, we know that
the damage is in the cortex. The same concept applies to the yellow
stimulus,” says Dr Carle. “The test has been successful in checking the
vision of people with glaucoma or type-1 diabetes, and we have now
tweaked the stimuli for stroke patients as well.”
Prof Ted Maddess says that the test will complement various types of brain scans.
“A CT scan tells you where the bleed is, but it doesn’t show you
everything,” he says. “For instance, the blood could have cleared up in a
particular part of the brain during the scan, or where swelling has
reduced the function of a nearby part that looks fine on the scan. It
may also miss injuries that are too small, or those that occur in the
midbrain, where it doesn’t scan well.”
This is where the test can be useful, Prof Maddess says. As every
single vision cell is wired into a different part of the brain, by
testing a particular area in the visual field, doctors can check if the
corresponding part of the brain is functioning or not.
The test can be used to monitor stroke patients’ recovery, Prof
Maddess says: “Currently, apart from brain scans, there is no cheap,
routine test that can quantify the amount of improvement that results
from a treatment. Stroke patients have a very high risk of recurrence,
so it’s important that doctors can accurately assess their recovery.”
“The TrueField Analyzer is small, affordable and the
test only takes ten minutes,” he says. Working together with
neurologists, the research team will start clinical tests with stroke
patients in February this year.
The team’s study “The pupillary response to color and luminance
variant multifocal stimuli” by Corinne F. Carle, Andrew C. James and Ted
Maddess is published in the latest issue of Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science (IOVS). Read it here.
Use the labels in the right column to find what you want. Or you can go thru them one by one, there are only 28,972 posts. Searching is done in the search box in upper left corner. I blog on anything to do with stroke.DO NOT DO ANYTHING SUGGESTED HERE AS I AM NOT MEDICALLY TRAINED, YOUR DOCTOR IS, LISTEN TO THEM. BUT I BET THEY DON'T KNOW HOW TO GET YOU 100% RECOVERED. I DON'T EITHER, BUT HAVE PLENTY OF QUESTIONS FOR YOUR DOCTOR TO ANSWER.
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.
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