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.

Friday, August 22, 2014

Not only cardiovascular, but also coordinative exercise increases hippocampal volume in older adults

You will need to ask your doctor for what exactly is a coordination exercise and the stroke protocol that goes with it.
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnagi.2014.00170/full?
  • 1Jacobs Center on Lifelong Learning and Institutional Development, Jacobs University Bremen, Bremen, Germany
  • 2AgeAct Research Center, Jacobs University Bremen, Bremen, Germany
Cardiovascular activity has been shown to be positively associated with gray and white matter volume of, amongst others, frontal and temporal brain regions in older adults. This is particularly true for the hippocampus, a brain structure that plays an important role in learning and memory, and whose decline has been related to the development of Alzheimer’s disease. In the current study, we were interested in whether not only cardiovascular activity but also other types of physical activity, i.e., coordination training, were also positively associated with the volume of the hippocampus in older adults. For this purpose we first collected cross-sectional data on “metabolic fitness” (cardiovascular fitness and muscular strength) and “motor fitness” (e.g., balance, movement speed, fine coordination). Second, we performed a 12-month randomized controlled trial. Results revealed that motor fitness but not metabolic fitness was associated with hippocampal volume. After the 12-month intervention period, both, cardiovascular and coordination training led to increases in hippocampal volume. Our findings suggest that a high motor fitness level as well as different types of physical activity were beneficial to diminish age-related hippocampal volume shrinkage or even increase hippocampal volume.

Introduction

It has repeatedly been shown that physical activity is positively related to brain structure and function (see Kramer et al., 2006; Hillman et al., 2008; Park and Reuter-Lorenz, 2009) as well as cognitive performance (for a review see Etnier et al., 2006) and that it might reduce the risk of developing dementia (Sumic et al., 2007; Erickson et al., 2012). Particularly the hippocampal formation has been in the focus of these studies investigating the positive effect of physical activity on brain volume because this brain structure is thought to be significantly involved in diseases related to memory impairment like, e.g., Alzheimer’s disease (Driscoll et al., 2003; Barnes et al., 2009). Whereas positive correlations between cardiovascular activity and hippocampal volume have been shown, it is unknown whether this applies to other types of physical activity like, e.g., coordination training, as well. With this paper we aim to extend the knowledge about the effects of different physical activity interventions in older adults and its potential to diminish the decline in hippocampal volume during the aging process.

The Hippocampus and its Shrinkage Across the Adult Lifespan

The hippocampal formation as part of the limbic system is located in the medial temporal lobe. It is highly involved in processes of episodic memory formation (Tulving and Markowitsch, 1998; Van Petten, 2004) and spatial navigation (O’Keefe, 1990; Maguire et al., 2000). Both cognitive dimensions are especially vulnerable to performance loss in late adulthood (cf. Hedden and Gabrieli, 2004). Recently, the hippocampus has also been associated with motor sequence consolidation (Albouy et al., 2008). Over the adult lifespan, on average, hippocampal volume shrinks about 0.86% per year, but this development is highly non-linear (Raz et al., 2004b). Whereas for adults below the age of 50 annual hippocampal volume reductions of only 0.51% were observed, adults above the age of 50 revealed a much steeper annual volume decline of 1.18% (Raz et al., 2004b). These volume reductions are mainly attributed to reductions in the neuropil part of the brain structure and – to a smaller extend – to cell body shrinkage and changes in vascularization (Thomas et al., 2012).

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