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, July 18, 2013

NIH-funded study suggests that moving more may lower stroke risk

Before my stroke I was in fantastic shape, I did a mile and half portage over extremely rough terrain the week prior. I highly doubt anyone could have been in better shape than me. Thats why I hate these generalized stroke prevention ideas, just pure laziness on researchers part. Blame the victim.
http://www.healthcanal.com/brain-nerves/stroke/40945-nih-funded-study-suggests-that-moving-more-may-lower-stroke-risk.html
Here’s yet another reason to get off the couch: new research findings suggest that regularly breaking a sweat may lower the risk of having a stroke.
A stroke can occur when a blood vessel in the brain gets blocked. As a result, nearby brain cells will die after not getting enough oxygen and other nutrients. A number of risk factors for stroke have been identified, including smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes and being inactive.
For this study, published in the journal Stroke, Michelle N. McDonnell, Ph.D., from the University of South Australia, Adelaide and her colleagues obtained data from the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study. REGARDS is a large, long-term study funded by the NIH National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) to look at the reasons behind the higher rates of stroke mortality among African-Americans and other residents living in the Southeastern United States.
“Epidemiological studies such as REGARDS provide an important opportunity to explore race, genetics, environmental, and lifestyle choices as stroke risk factors,” said Claudia Moy, Ph.D., program director at NINDS.
Over 30,000 participants supplied their medical history over the phone. The researchers also visited them to obtain health measures such as body mass index and blood pressure. At the beginning of the study, the researchers asked participants how many times per week they exercised vigorously enough to work up a sweat. The researchers contacted participants every six months to see if they had experienced a stroke or a mini-stroke known as a transient ischemic attack (TIA). To confirm their responses, the researchers reviewed participants’ medical records.
The researchers reported data for over 27,000 participants who were stroke-free at the start of the study and followed for an average of 5.7 years. One-third of participants reported exercising less than once a week. Study subjects who were inactive were 20 percent more likely to experience a stroke or TIA than participants who exercised four or more times a week.
The findings revealed that regular, moderately vigorous exercise, enough to break a sweat, was linked to reduced risk of stroke. Part of the protective effect was due to lower rates of known stroke risk factors such as hypertension, diabetes, obesity and smoking.
“Our results confirm other research findings but our study has the distinct advantage of including larger numbers, especially larger numbers of women as well as blacks, in a national population sample so these provide somewhat more generalizable results than other studies,” said Virginia Howard, Ph.D., senior author of the study from the School of Public Health, University of Alabama at Birmingham.
The researchers also looked at the data according to gender. After the researchers accounted for age, race, socioeconomic factors (education and income) and stroke risk factors, the results revealed that men who exercised at least four times a week still had a lower risk of stroke than men who exercised one to three times per week. In contrast, there was no association between frequency of exercise and stroke risk among women in the study. However, there was a trend towards a similar reduction in stroke risk for those who exercised one to three times a week and four or more times a week compared to those who were inactive.
“This could be related to differences in the type, duration, and intensity of physical activity between men and women,” said Dr. Howard. “This could also be due to differences in the perception of what is intense physical activity enough to work up a sweat.”
The results should encourage doctors to stress the importance of exercise when speaking with their patients, Dr. Howard said.
“Physical inactivity is a major modifiable risk factor for stroke. This should be emphasized in routine physician check-ups along with general education about the benefits of exercise on stroke risk factors including high blood pressure, diabetes and being overweight or obese,” she said.
The study suggests that men should consider exercising at least four times a week.
REGARDS will continue to assess stroke risk factors to look for long-term patterns in the study population. “Findings from this study, including the current physical activity results, will ultimately help us to identify potential targets for immediate intervention as well as for future clinical trials aimed at preventing stroke and its consequences,” said Dr. Moy.
This study was supported by NINDS grant U01 NS041588.
For more information about stroke, please visit:
http://www.stroke.nih.gov
NINDS is the nation’s leading funder of research on the brain and nervous system. The NINDS mission is to reduce the burden of neurological disease – a burden borne by every age group, by every segment of society, by people all over the world.
About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.

Michelle N. McDonnell, Ph.D. et al. “Physical Activity Frequency and Risk of Incident Stroke in a National U.S. Study of Blacks and Whites.” Stroke, July 18, 2013.

4 comments:

  1. When I first read the title I got really excited cause I thought you meant moving moving. I can't wait to move to Florida. But then I realized the study is about exercise. I guess it wouldn't make much sense that relocating would lower stroke risk.

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  2. But it would lower your dementia risk for all the cognition you'll expend learning a new place and new social contacts. But you're a youngster, no need to worry about dementia yet.

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  3. Hi Dean, I just wrote a chapter for my book re our tendency to blame the victim; I too was very physically active and fit before having a stroke - in fact, like you, mine was "caused" by rowing, and I use that situation to look at the inactive, overweight, french-fry eating stroke survivors as having been setting themselves up for stroke, while I didn't "deserve" the one I had. That's blaming the victim.

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    1. To me they are just lazy and not willing to do the hard work to really identify the causes of stroke that people could really use to prevent them. Telling someone to exercise more is quite stupid.

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