Deans' stroke musings: The Effect of Body Mass Index on Stroke Rehabilitation

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.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

The Effect of Body Mass Index on Stroke Rehabilitation

Interesting conclusion that overweight patients made better progress. Or is that just the Hawthorne Effect of being under observation?
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003999314000896

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apmr.2014.01.019

Abstract

Objective

To investigate the association between body mass index and the functional progress of patients with stroke, admitted to a rehabilitation hospital.

Design

this retrospective cohort study included all patients admitted to the stroke unit of a rehabilitation hospital.

Setting

the setting was a freestanding University rehabilitation Hospital stroke unit.

Participants

Participants (N=819) included all patients admitted to the stroke unit of the rehabilitation Hospital during the study.

Interventions

not applicable

Main Outcome Measures

the primary study outcome measure was the functional Independence measure (FIM) efficiency of patients by body mass index category.

Results

For the 819 patients admitted during the observation period, BMI was compared with FIM score changes per day (FIM efficiency). After adjusting for age, and sex, the FIM efficiency differed by BMI. The underweight group had the lowest FIM efficiency followed by the obese and normal weight subgroups. The overweight group had the highest FIM efficiency (p = 0.05) when compared to the obese subgroup.

Conclusion

This study found that among patients admitted to an acute rehabilitation hospital for stroke rehabilitation, overweight patients had better functional progress than did patients in the other weight categories.

Deans' stroke musings