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, July 30, 2015

Blood test predicts prognosis for traumatic brain injuries

Another possibility that needs more followup research to see if this would work for stroke. Who the hell do we talk to to get this accomplished? Or do we just sit and wait 50 years because we have no stroke leaders or any strategy to fix stroke problems?
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-07-blood-prognosis-traumatic-brain-injuries.html

A new blood test could help emergency room doctors quickly diagnose traumatic brain injury and determine its severity. The findings, published July 10 in the Journal of Neurotrauma, could help identify patients who might benefit from extra therapy or experimental treatments.
 
"Compared to other proteins that have been measured in , BDNF does a much better job of predicting outcomes," says Frederick Korley, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and first author of the new paper.
After a hit to the head or rapid whiplash, whether from a car crash, athletic event or other accident, millions of Americans develop traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) each year. TBIs can range from mild concussions—causing only a headache or temporary blurred vision—to much more severe injuries—causing seizures, confusion, memory and attention problems, muscle weakness, or coma for many months. These symptoms, whether mild or more severe, are generally caused by damaged brain cells.
Until now, most physicians have relied on CT scans and patients' symptoms to determine whether to send them home and have them resume their usual activities or take extra precautions. However, CT scans can only detect bleeding in the brain, not damage to brain cells, which can happen without bleeding.
"A typical situation is that someone comes to the emergency department with a suspected TBI, we get a CT scan, and if the scan shows no bleeding, we send the patient home," says Korley. "However, these patients go home and continue having headaches, difficulty concentrating and memory problems, and they can't figure out why they are having these symptoms after doctors told them everything was fine."
Korley and collaborators around the country wanted to know if a blood test could better predict which patients would have ongoing brain injury-related problems, to provide better treatment for them. So they measured the levels of three proteins that they suspected play a role in brain cell activity in more than 300 patients with a TBI and 150 patients without brain injuries. Then, they followed those with a TBI for the next six months.
Levels of one protein, called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), taken within 24 hours of someone's head injury, could predict the severity of a TBI and how a patient would fare, they found. While healthy people averaged 60 nanograms per milliliter of BDNF in their bloodstreams, patients with brain injuries had less than one-third of that amount, averaging less than 20 nanograms per milliliter, and those with the most severe TBIs had even lower levels, around 4 nanograms per milliliter. Moreover, patients with high levels of BDNF had mostly recovered from their injuries six months later. But in patients with the lowest levels of BDNF, symptoms still lingered at follow-up. The results suggest that a test for BDNF levels, administered in the emergency room, could help stratify patients.
"The advantage of being able to predict prognosis early on is that you can advise patients on what to do, recommend whether they need to take time off work or school, and decide whether they need to follow up with a rehab doctor or neurologist," Korley says. In addition, it could help decide which to enroll in clinical trials for new drugs or therapies targeting severe TBIs.
Korley would like to follow up with more research on why, at a molecular level, brain injuries lower levels of BDNF in the blood and whether things known to increase BDNF levels—including exercise and omega-3 fatty acids—could help treat TBIs. He also wants to know whether changes in BDNF levels over time can be a proxy for recovery and if they could be used to gauge the effectiveness of an intervention.
"We looked at that very first blood sample obtained within 24 hours of an injury," he says. "But for BDNF to be used as a surrogate outcome, we'll have to see what happens to BDNF blood levels down the line, at one, three or six months after the injury." He and his collaborators have already started collecting data for those prospective studies, he adds.
Journal reference: Journal of Neurotrauma search and more info

1 comment:

  1. Thank God. I know a young athlete who gamed the system by deliberately acting dumb on the baseline questions her coach gave her.

    ReplyDelete