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 26, 2015

Head injury patients show signs of faster ageing in the brain

Inquiring minds want to know what this would say about stroke survivors. But it won't occur because our stroke associations are not innovative enough to even try to find answers to any stroke question.
So we are left with this very old statement. Compared with the normal rate of neuron loss in brain aging, the ischemic brain ages 3.6 years each hour without treatment.
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=151080&CultureCode=en
People who have suffered serious head injuries show changes in brain structure resembling those seen in older people, according to a new study.
Researchers at Imperial College London analysed brain scans from over 1,500 healthy people to develop a computer program that could predict a person's age from their brain scan. Then they used the program to estimate the "brain age" of 113 more healthy people and 99 patients who had suffered traumatic brain injuries.
The brain injury patients were estimated to be around five years older on average than their real age.
Head injuries are already known to increase the risk of age-related neurological conditions such as dementia later in life. The age prediction model may be useful as a screening tool to identify patients who are likely to develop problems and to target strategies that prevent or slow their decline.
"Your chronological age is not necessarily the best indicator of your health or how much longer you will live," said Dr James Cole, who led the study, from the Department of Medicine at Imperial College London. "There is a lot of interest in finding biomarkers of ageing that can be used to measure a certain aspect of your health and predict future problems."
The study, published in the April issue of Annals of Neurology, used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study changes in brain structure. The researchers used a machine learning algorithm to develop a computer program that could recognise age-related differences in the volume of white matter and grey matter in different parts of the brain.
The model was then used to estimate subjects' ages based on their brain scans. The study included 99 patients with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) caused by road accidents, falls or assaults, who had persistent neurological problems. The scans were taken between one month and 46 years after their injuries.
In healthy controls, the average difference between predicted age and real age was zero. In TBI patients, the difference was significantly higher, with a bigger discrepancy in patients with more severe injuries. Bigger differences in predicted age were associated with cognitive impairments such as poor memory and slow reaction times.
There was also a correlation between time since injury and predicted age difference, suggesting that these changes in brain structure do not occur during the injury itself, but result from ongoing biological processes, potentially similar to those seen in normal ageing, that progress more quickly after an injury.
"Traumatic brain injury is not a static event," said Dr Cole. "It can set off secondary processes, possibly related to inflammation, that can cause more damage in the brain for years afterwards, and may contribute to the development of Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia."
The researchers believe the age prediction model could be applied not just to TBI patients, but might also be useful to screen outwardly healthy people.
"We want to do a study where we use the program to estimate brain age in healthy people, then see if the ones with 'old brains' are more likely to get neurodegenerative diseases. If it works, we could use it to identify people at high risk, enrol them in trials and potentially prescribe treatments that might stave off disease," said Dr Cole.
The researchers received funding from the EU Seventh Framework Programme and a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) professorship for Professor David Sharp. The research was also supported by the NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre.

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