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, June 19, 2014

When Couples Disagree on Stroke Recovery, One Partner Can Suffer

My ex being a former physical therapist made it quite clear that  I could expect no help in doing exercises and I had no medical background to question anything about what my doctor or therapists had me doing.
I obviously wasn't recovering very well because I wasn't following the therapy to the exact letter.
http://healthnews.uc.edu/news/?/24728/

An innovative study from a University of Cincinnati (UC) social work researcher has found that when a stroke survivor and his or her caregiving spouse disagree on the survivor’s rate of recovery, the caregiving spouse is more likely to experience depression and emotional distress. 

Assistant Professor Michael McCarthy, PhD, working with co-author Karen Lyons at the Oregon Health and Science University, interviewed 35 couples in which one spouse had experienced a stroke within the past three years.

In separate sessions, stroke survivors and their spouses discussed the survivor’s recovery, including the performance of daily functions, their memory and ability to problem solve. In the first mixed-method study in the topic, both quantitative and qualitative data showed that spouses rated rehabilitation progress as significantly worse than survivors—and that this discrepancy was associated with spouse depression. 

"We found that spouses rated their partners’ recovery worse than survivors rated it themselves, and that this discrepancy predicted depressive symptoms in the spouses,” says McCarthy.

"So if the wife has a stroke,” he continues, "and she believes, for example, that she can still drive but her husband doesn’t—the difference in their perception is predictive of the husband’s emotional distress. We were able to quantify and capture a different kind of worry and stress that caregiving spouses can experience and connect it to their outcomes.” 

He adds that the magnitude of the discrepancy in perceptions between survivors and spousal caregivers is key to predicting depression in spousal caregivers—which can then cycle back onto the survivors. 

McCarthy says there is some evidence that wives may be particularly susceptive to caregiver worry, as are spouses in strong, fulfilling relationships. With studies demonstrating that stroke caregivers have higher rates of depression than the general public and may be at higher risk for stroke themselves as well as premature death, caregiver mental health has profound consequences.

McCarthy hopes the study can help social work and other rehabilitation practitioners working with stroke survivors. Overall, he says health care needs to broaden the conversation around stroke recovery: from focusing solely on the patient to considering the patient-spouse couple as a unit. 

"How the spouse is doing matters in the equation,” he says. "They need as much care, if not more in some ways, as the patient. We need to bring partners together in the rehabilitation process, to align each person’s expectations and perceptions in order to achieve the best outcomes.” 

His paper, "Incongruence between stroke survivor and spouse perceptions of survivor functioning and effects on spouse emotional health,” has been published online in the journal Aging & Mental Health.

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