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.

Sunday, August 18, 2013

A Theoretically Based Index of Consciousness Independent of Sensory Processing and Behavior

Sounds useful for determining stroke patients consciousness.
An article describing it here;

Brain Shaking Technique - strong magnetic stimulation - Offers Measure of Consciousness

The abstract here; 

http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/5/198/198ra105 

  1. Marcello Massimini1,5,§
+ Author Affiliations
  1. 1Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences ‘Luigi Sacco’, University of Milan, 20157 Milan, Italy.
  2. 2Coma Science Group, Cyclotron Research Centre and Neurology Department, University and University Hospital of Liège, 4000 Liège, Belgium.
  3. 3Institute of Science and Technology, Federal University of São Paulo, 12231-280 São José dos Campos, Brazil.
  4. 4Department of Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53719, USA.
  5. 5Istituto Di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico, Fondazione Don Carlo Gnocchi, 20148 Milan, Italy.
+ Author Notes
  • * These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • Present address: Faculty of Medicine Clinics Hospital, University of São Paulo, 05403-000 São Paulo, Brazil.
  • Present address: Department of Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53719, USA.
  1. §Corresponding author. E-mail: marcello.massimini@unimi.it

Abstract

One challenging aspect of the clinical assessment of brain-injured, unresponsive patients is the lack of an objective measure of consciousness that is independent of the subject’s ability to interact with the external environment. Theoretical considerations suggest that consciousness depends on the brain’s ability to support complex activity patterns that are, at once, distributed among interacting cortical areas (integrated) and differentiated in space and time (information-rich). We introduce and test a theory-driven index of the level of consciousness called the perturbational complexity index (PCI). PCI is calculated by (i) perturbing the cortex with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to engage distributed interactions in the brain (integration) and (ii) compressing the spatiotemporal pattern of these electrocortical responses to measure their algorithmic complexity (information). We test PCI on a large data set of TMS-evoked potentials recorded in healthy subjects during wakefulness, dreaming, nonrapid eye movement sleep, and different levels of sedation induced by anesthetic agents (midazolam, xenon, and propofol), as well as in patients who had emerged from coma (vegetative state, minimally conscious state, and locked-in syndrome). PCI reliably discriminated the level of consciousness in single individuals during wakefulness, sleep, and anesthesia, as well as in patients who had emerged from coma and recovered a minimal level of consciousness. PCI can potentially be used for objective determination of the level of consciousness at the bedside.

 

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