Deans' stroke musings: Functional organization and restoration of the brain motorexecution after stroke

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, March 19, 2015

Functional organization and restoration of the brain motorexecution after stroke

How is your doctor using this information to help your recovery?
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00173/pdf&hl=en&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm1Im_CcyvXtB6AkUmn3FTithBB9xQ&nossl=1&oi=scholaralrt
Abstract
Multiple cortical areas of the human brain motor system interact coherently in the low
frequency range (< 0.1 Hz), even in the absence of explicit tasks. Following stroke,
cortical interactions are functionally disturbed. How these interactions are affected and
how the functional organization is regained from rehabilitative treatments as people begin
to recover motor behaviors has not been systematically studied. We recorded the intrinsic
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals from 30 participants: 17 young
healthy controls and 13 aged stroke survivors. Stroke participants underwent mental
practice (MP) or both mental practice and physical therapy (MP + PT) within 14-51 days
following stroke. We investigated the network activity of five core areas in the motorexecution
network, consisting of the left primary motor area (LM1), the right primary
motor area (RM1), the left pre-motor cortex (LPMC), the right pre-motor cortex (RPMC)
and the supplementary motor area (SMA). We discovered that (i) the network activity
dominated in the frequency range 0.06 Hz – 0.08 Hz for all the regions, and for both ablebodied
and stroke participants (ii) the causal information flow between the regions: LM1
and SMA, RPMC and SMA, RPMC and LM1, SMA and RM1, SMA and LPMC, was
reduced significantly for stroke survivors (iii) the flow did not increase significantly after
MP alone and (iv) the flow among the regions during MP+PT increased significantly. We
also found that sensation and motor scores were significantly higher and correlated with
directed functional connectivity measures when the stroke-survivors underwent MP+PT
but not MP alone. The findings provide evidence that a combination of mental practice
and physical therapy can be an effective means of treatment for stroke survivors to
recover or regain the strength of motor behaviors, and that the spectra of causal
information flow can be used as a reliable biomarker for evaluating rehabilitation in
stroke survivors.