Deans' stroke musings: Brachial-ankle pulse wave velocity for predicting functional outcome in acute 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.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Brachial-ankle pulse wave velocity for predicting functional outcome in acute stroke

I could see this as some sort of correlation but I can't see this as the real reason for being able to predict outcome. If you want to predict outcome you do the obvious thing and come up with an objective diagnosis of dead and damaged areas. None of this using secondary deficit measurements like Barthel, Rankin or FIM. Please learn about cause and effect.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24968933

Kim J¹, Song TJ¹, Kim EH¹, Lee KJ¹, Lee HS¹, Nam CM¹, Song D¹, Nam HS¹, Kim YD¹, Heo JH².

Author information

Abstract

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE:

We investigated whether the brachial-ankle pulse wave velocity (baPWV) has prognostic value for predicting functional outcome after acute cerebral infarction and whether the prognostic value differs between stroke subtypes.

METHODS:

We included 1091 consecutive patients with first-ever acute cerebral infarction who underwent baPWV measurements. Stroke subtypes were classified using the Trial of Org 10172 in Acute Stroke Treatment classification. Poor functional outcomes were defined as modified Rankin Scale score >2 at 3 months after stroke onset.

RESULTS:

We noted that 181 (16.59%) patients had a poor functional outcome. In multivariate logistic regression, patients in the highest tertile of baPWV (>22.25 m/s) were found to be at increased risk for poor functional outcome (adjusted odds ratio, 1.88; 95% confidence interval, 1.06-3.40) compared with those in the lowest tertile (<17.55 m/s). No significant interaction between baPWV and stroke subtype was noted. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis indicated that the addition of baPWV to the prediction model significantly improved the discrimination ability for poor functional outcome.

CONCLUSIONS:

baPWV has an independent prognostic value(really?) for predicting functional outcome after acute cerebral infarction. The prognostic value did not differ according to the stroke subtype.