Deans' stroke musings: Even Small Brain Lesions May Signal Risk

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.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Even Small Brain Lesions May Signal Risk

My doctor told me that there were signs that that I'd had previous strokes. Of course he didn't show me them on scans or discuss what could be done for any problems they might cause. I'm sure that now - 9 years later - that this news won't cause any change to his behavior.
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Neurology/Strokes/52472?xid=nl_mpt_cardiodaily_2015-07-07&eun=g0d3r

Analysis of ARIC data suggests physicians should pay attention to little lesions, too.

Even very small cerebrovascular lesions on MRI may tell of a higher risk of stroke and death, researchers found.
In an analysis of data from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study, having lesions smaller than 3 mm was associated with a significantly increased risk of stroke compared with lesion-free scans (HR 3.47, 95% CI 1.86-6.49), Thomas Mosley, PhD, of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and colleagues reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
That association was actually stronger than the twofold increased risk of stroke with larger lesions, the researchers found.
Mosley told MedPage Today that he was surprised by that finding in particular: "Because the small lesions are at the edge of resolution, they're easy to miss and hence there is more noise in the measurement of these small lesions compared with other MRI-derived measurements. I wasn't sure if this noise would perhaps overpower our ability to detect an association with the outcomes, if one existed. This obviously wasn't the case."
While cerebral lesions 3 mm or larger have been associated with stroke, those smaller than 3 mm are typically ignored. But there have been few studies to assess whether these very small lesions may also be related to important clinical outcomes.
To get a better handle on the significance of these smaller lesions, the researchers looked at data from the ARIC study on 1,884 patients with no prior stroke who had MRI data from 1993 to 1995.

More at link.