Have your doctor report back to you when the clinical trial results are released.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428026/pill-could-reverse-effects-of-a-stroke-long-after-it-hits/
For the 800,000 people in the United States who suffer a stroke each
year, the window for drug therapy closes in the first few hours after
the attack. That leaves some seven million stroke survivors in this
country alone with no medical alternative beyond physical therapy. A
small pharmaceutical company in New York hopes to change that with a
drug that may help patients regain some of their lost mobility six
months or more after a stroke.
Strokes happen when blood stops
flowing to part of the brain, often due to a blood clot. Without blood
to bring new oxygen, cells in the affected region start to die. If the
symptoms of stroke are recognized quickly enough and the victim is
brought to a hospital within a few hours, doctors can administer a
clot-dissolving drug to minimize the damage. But only a small fraction
of stroke patients seek medical attention soon enough for this
intervention.
“If they miss this therapeutic window, the
consequences are heavier, so it’s important to be able to do something
for those patients who miss that window,” says Francesca Bosetti,
a stroke expert with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders
and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health.
In
the future, stroke patients who miss this window and are affected by
reduced mobility long after their stroke may be able to turn to a drug
that helps damaged nerves transmit electrical signals in the brain.
Earlier this year, Acorda Therapeutics
reported that the compound dalfampridine improved motor function in
both the forelimbs and hind limbs of rats that had suffered a stroke.
This month, the company began recruiting patients for a clinical trial
to test the effects of the compound in human stroke patients. Acorda
plans to enroll about 70 people who have had a stroke at least six
months prior. “That’s the time that deficits seem to stabilize, so we
can eliminate naturally occurring improvements in patients,” says Jeff
MacDonald, an Acorda spokesman.
Acorda is focusing on
neurological disorders at a time when many pharmaceutical companies seem
to be turning away from such maladies. The company was founded in 1995
to treat spinal-cord injuries and has since taken on other neurological
conditions, including multiple sclerosis and stroke. The company
originally licensed dalfampridine from drugmaker Elan
in the hope of using it to treat spinal-cord injuries, but instead it
found more success in treating multiple sclerosis patients. “We followed
it to where it was leading,” says Andrew Blight, chief scientific
officer for Acorda.
Spinal-cord injuries still garner a lot of focus from the company, which hopes to begin testing a compound
licensed from Medtronic that protects neurons from the wave of cell
death that follows the initial injury. Medtronic had already shown the
compound to be safe in healthy patients, and later this year, Acorda
plans to test its efficacy in patients in the first hours after a
spinal-cord injury.
Patients with injured spinal cords are not
nearly as numerous as stroke patients, “but if you are talking about
costs to society, spinal-cord injuries are extremely expensive,” says Naomi Kleitman,
a spinal-cord injury expert with NINDS. “They tend to happen in fairly
young people who need a lot of medical and assistive help if they have
severe injuries.”
The company is also looking to treat longer-standing spinal-cord injuries with a drug
that would help break down the scar tissue that forms around a
spinal-cord injury. The scar tissue is thought to prevent nerves from
establishing the new connections that may help patients recover some
functionality. The product is still in early development, and one
challenge will be devising a method to deliver the large scar-busting
molecule to its target site.
Despite the pressing need, the small
market for spinal-cord injury drugs may be one reason the condition
doesn’t get a lot of attention from pharmaceutical giants. “No one else
wants to develop compounds to treat spinal-cord injury as seriously as
Acorda,” says Edward Hall,
a neurologist and spinal-cord and brain-injury specialist at the
University of Kentucky in Lexington. “These aren’t going to be
billion-dollar-a-year products.”
Numbers will not be an issue for
long-term stroke patients. Stroke is the leading cause of adult
disability, and the number of people living with its effects is growing.
“We are getting better at preventing stroke death, but the incidence is
going up because the population is aging, and age is the greatest risk
factor,” says S. Thomas Carmichael, a neurologist and neurorepair researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Relatively
few groups are working on treating the effects of a stroke more than
six months after it occurred, says Carmichael, in part because the
disorder is tricky to model in lab animals.
“It’s great for the field that [Acorda] is there,” he says. “Right now, there are no pharmaceutical options.”
However,
Carmichael cautions that even six months or more after a stroke,
patients can respond to focused rehabilitative intervention, which
suggests that movement is an important part of recovery. “You have to
pay attention to physical activity.” A patient’s own activity level can
confound a trial if it’s not well monitored, but it could also lead to
the greatest outcomes, he says, if made a part of it.
Use the labels in the right column to find what you want. Or you can go thru them one by one, there are only 29,116 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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