Deans' stroke musings: Planning following stroke: a relational complexity approach using the Tower of London

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.

Monday, February 9, 2015

Planning following stroke: a relational complexity approach using the Tower of London

No idea what this means. Your doctor will know.
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.01032/full?
Glenda Andrews¹*,

Graeme S. Halford²,

Mark Chappell²,

Annick Maujean³ and

David H. K. Shum²

¹Behavioural Basis of Health Program, Griffith Health Institute, School of Applied Psychology, Griffith University, Gold Coast, QLD, Australia
²Behavioural Basis of Health Program, Griffith Health Institute, School of Applied Psychology, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
³Centre for National Research on Disability and Rehabilitation Medicine (CONROD), Griffith Health Institute, Griffith University, Meadowbrook, QLD, Australia

Planning on the 4-disk version of the Tower of London (TOL4) was examined in stroke patients and unimpaired controls. Overall TOL4 solution scores indicated impaired planning in the frontal stroke but not non-frontal stroke patients. Consistent with the claim that processing the relations between current states, intermediate states, and goal states is a key process in planning, the domain-general relational complexity metric was a good indicator of the experienced difficulty of TOL4 problems. The relational complexity metric shared variance with task-specific metrics of moves to solution and search depth. Frontal stroke patients showed impaired planning compared to controls on problems at all three complexity levels, but at only two of the three levels of moves to solution, search depth and goal ambiguity. Non-frontal stroke patients showed impaired planning only on the most difficult quaternary-relational and high search depth problems. An independent measure of relational processing (viz., Latin square task) predicted TOL4 solution scores after controlling for stroke status and location, and executive processing (Trail Making Test). The findings suggest that planning involves a domain-general capacity for relational processing that depends on the frontal brain regions.