Deans' stroke musings: Amphetamine and post-stroke rehabilitation: indications and controversies

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, April 10, 2013

Amphetamine and post-stroke rehabilitation: indications and controversies

Another problem of our stupid war on drugs. We have a hard time even getting this into clinical trials.
http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/23558704/reload=0;jsessionid=aNQZp2qo4f17DmyziiW4.0
There is robust evidence for amphetamine (AMPH) facilitated recovery from behavioral deficits in animal models of stroke. Following experimental lesions, numerous studies of motor, somatosensory and vision recovery show AMPH accelerates the rate of recovery when paired with relevant behavioral experience. While the experimental literature continues to mount for an AMPH effect, the translation to clinical studies has been far less clear. This is due in part to the inherent difficulty of extrapolating results in animals to humans; however, there is much controversy regarding how the basic science data is interpreted for the design of human clinical trials. This review will: overview noteworthy experimental studies that have strong implications for human rehabilitation; describe the blinded drug/placebo clinical trials administering AMPH to enhance recovery of motor and language deficits post-stroke published to date; discuss the various complexities and controversies of designing clinical trials which may affect response/non-response to pharmacologic agents and conclude with suggestions of critical questions still to be answered for the rehabilitation specialist.