Deans' stroke musings: Neurovascular coupling, cerebral white matter integrity, and response to cocoa in older people

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, January 27, 2016

Neurovascular coupling, cerebral white matter integrity, and response to cocoa in older people

I bet your doctor can't put two and two together to have hot cocoa added to your daily diet protocol in the hospital. Failure to do that is worth a call to the president asking what the hell the performance goals are for stroke doctors.
http://www.neurology.org/content/81/10/904

Farzaneh A. Sorond, MD, PhD,
Shelley Hurwitz, PhD,
David H. Salat, PhD,
Douglas N. Greve, PhD and
Naomi D.L. Fisher, MD

+Show Affiliations

Correspondence to Dr. Sorond: fsorond@partners.org

Published online before print August 7, 2013, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1212/WNL.0b013e3182a351aa Neurology September 3, 2013 vol. 81 no. 10 904-909

Abstract

Objective: To investigate the relationship between neurovascular coupling and cognitive function in elderly individuals with vascular risk factors and to determine whether neurovascular coupling could be modified by cocoa consumption.

Methods: Sixty older people (aged 72.9 ± 5.4 years) were studied in a parallel-arm, double-blind clinical trial of neurovascular coupling and cognition in response to 24 hours and 30 days of cocoa consumption. Cognitive measures included Mini-Mental State Examination and Trail Making Test A and B. Neurovascular coupling was measured from the beat-to-beat blood flow velocity responses in the middle cerebral arteries to the N-Back Task. In a subset of MRI-eligible participants, cerebral white matter structural integrity was also measured.

Results: Neurovascular coupling was associated with Trails B scores (p = 0.002) and performance on the 2-Back Task. Higher neurovascular coupling was also associated with significantly higher fractional anisotropy in cerebral white matter hyperintensities (p = 0.02). Finally, 30 days of cocoa consumption was associated with increased neurovascular coupling (5.6% ± 7.2% vs −2.4% ± 4.8%; p = 0.001) and improved Trails B times (116 ± 78 seconds vs 167 ± 110 seconds; p = 0.007) in those with impaired neurovascular coupling at baseline.

Conclusion: There is a strong correlation between neurovascular coupling and cognitive function, and both can be improved by regular cocoa consumption in individuals with baseline impairments. Better neurovascular coupling is also associated with greater white matter structural integrity.