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 14, 2016

Study Shows Effectiveness of Brief, Simple Test to Screen for Cognitive Impairment in AD

Don't try this King–Devick Test on your own.

Is your doctor testing your cognition right now to establish a basline for comparison? You are likely to need it.
1. A documented 33% dementia chance post-stroke from an Australian study? May 2012.
2. Then this study came out and seems to have a range from 17-66%. December 2013.
3. A 20% chance in this research. July 2013.
If you have anything close to a decent doctor a protocol will already be in place to prevent this from occurring.

http://dgnews.docguide.com/study-shows-effectiveness-brief-simple-test-screen-cognitive-impairment-ad?overlay=2&
For the first time, researchers have determined that a brief, simple number naming test can differentiate between cognitively healthy elderly individuals and cognitively impaired people with Alzheimer's disease (AD), including those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), as well as those with AD dementia.
The study appears online in the journal Alzheimer's Disease and Associated Disorders, and was conducted by researchers at Boston University Alzheimer's Disease Center (BU ADC), Boston, Massachusetts, with collaborators from Harvard Medical School in Boston, and New York University School of Medicine, New York, New York.
The King-Devick (K-D) test is a 1- to 2-minute rapid number naming test that has previously been found useful in the detection of concussion, as well as in detecting level of impairment in other neurological conditions such as Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis. The K-D test can be quickly administered by non-professional office staff on either a tablet or in a paper version.
For the current study, researchers at BU ADC administered the K-D test to 206 study participants, including 135 cognitively healthy individuals, 39 people with MCI, and 32 AD dementia patients, and found the test could accurately distinguish the controls from the cognitively impaired individuals more than 90% of the time.
The K-D performed equally well in detecting participants with MCI from controls as it did detecting the more advanced AD dementia patients from controls, providing evidence for its utility in screening for more subtle cognitive impairment. It also correlated strongly with lengthier, standardised neuropsychological tests.
“Alarmingly, AD is underdiagnosed in nearly half of the American population and the brain changes of AD may begin up to 20 years before clinical symptoms,” said Robert Stern, PhD, Boston University School of Medicine. “There is a need, therefore, for sensitive and readily available screening tools that can detect AD in its early stages, particularly as potential disease-modifying therapies become available.”
“If replicated in larger samples, our findings suggest that the K-D may be an appropriate screening test in fast-past clinical settings, such as primary care physician offices, to assist in the early detection of cognitive impairment and guide referral for more comprehensive evaluation to ultimately facilitate early intervention,” added Dr. Stern.
SOURCE: Boston University Medical Center