This is already approved therapy for other conditions. What is the downside and why isn't your doctor already doing this? And since you're depressed already you have a readymade reason to do this.
http://www.insidescience.org/content/shocking-new-therapy-stroke-recovery/1636
About every 40 seconds, someone somewhere has a stroke. Every four
minutes, someone dies from a stroke. They can strike anytime and affect
anyone.
Now scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas are studying a
new way to help stroke survivors regain any physical abilities that were
lost after a stroke.
Daniel Hulsey, a Ph.D. student of cognitive neuroscience at UT Dallas
said, “We want to be able to restore that function by restoring
circuitry in the brain.”
To accomplish this, researchers turned their attention to the vagus nerve, the nerve that tells the brain how the body is doing.
“When you stimulate this nerve, you send a signal up into the brain
that [indicates] what just happened is really interesting and
important,” said Michael Kilgard, a neuroscientist at UT Dallas.
When electrical pulses stimulate the nerve, the brain releases
chemicals from different areas and essentially re-organizes itself. This
enables the brain to learn new tasks.
"We’re taking areas that are spared – the remaining neurons nearby
that are intact – … and having them shift some of those resources over,”
to the areas that are affected by the stroke, explained Kilgard.
In animal studies, scientists stimulated the vagus nerve while rats
performed rehabilitation exercises. When the nerve was stimulated, the
exercises completely reversed the mice's stroke-induced paralyses.
“We found that animals that had paired vagus nerve stimulation [with]
motor movement recovered not only faster than animals that got rehab
alone, but they recovered fully back to the level prior to their
stroke,” said Navid Khodaparast, a neuroscientist at UT Dallas.
The electrical pulses are painless and last just a half of a second. A
similar study will soon be conducted on human subjects. Researchers are
hoping to see the same promising results.
Vagus nerve stimulation is already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration for treating other conditions such as depression and
epilepsy.
A neuroscientist explaining it in a video at the link.
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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I sent the vagus nerve stimulation link to my physiatrist and he immediately responded that he didn't think it could do any harm.
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