Deans' stroke musings: Warning over electrical brain stimulation

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, October 24, 2014

Warning over electrical brain stimulation

TDCS kits available to the public. I've written 20 posts on this so have your doctor tell you whether this is an appropriate intervention/stroke protocol for stroke rehab.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-27343047

Given the option, would you want to think faster and have sharper attention? Research suggests that electrical brain stimulation kits could have just those effects. But now some companies are selling such devices online, leading to calls to regulate the technology.

It may sound too good to be true but scientists say the technology is promising.
Transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS), which passes small electrical currents directly on to the scalp, stimulates the nerve cells in the brain (neurons).
It's non-invasive, extremely mild and the US military even uses TDCS in an attempt to improve the performance of its drone pilots.

“Start Quote

You need to know how long to stimulate, at what time to stimulate and what intensity to use”

Dr Roy Cohen Kadosh University of Oxford

The idea is that it makes the neurons more likely to fire and preliminary research suggests electrical simulation can improve attention as well as have a positive impact on people with cognitive impairments and depression.

It has also been shown to increase performance in a maths task, an improvement which was still in place six months later.
The scientist behind this work is Dr Roy Cohen Kadosh from the University of Oxford. He uses TDCS to look at how cognitive functions improve.

More at link.