Deans' stroke musings: Cleveland Clinic performs nation’s first deep brain stimulation surgery on stroke patient

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.

Friday, January 6, 2017

Cleveland Clinic performs nation’s first deep brain stimulation surgery on stroke patient

If you think about this, this has to be a patient that functions fairly well already. You can't stimulate neurons to fire that are dead. If you look at my dead area in my brain scan this would be totally useless for me.
https://www.dotmed.com/news/story/34666
Cleveland Clinic announced today that it performed the nation’s first deep brain stimulation surgery on a stroke patient. This is part of an ongoing clinical trial that’s evaluating whether DBS can improve movement after a stroke.

Only 10 percent of stroke survivors recover almost completely and 40 percent experience moderate to severe impairments requiring special care, according to the National Stroke Association.

In October 2016, the National Institutes of Health awarded Cleveland Clinic with a $5 million grant to develop the first clinical trial to assess DBS as a therapy for stroke recovery patients. Previous preclinical research done at the hospital found that DBS can help the brain form new neural connections during recovery.

A team led by Dr. Andre Machado, chairman of Cleveland Clinic’s neurological institute, performed the 6-hour procedure on December 19. Electrodes connected to a pacemaker device were implanted in the cerebellum and the small electric pulses were emitted.

“Our knowledge to date shows that deep brain stimulation can help the brain reorganize, can help the brain adapt, beyond what physical therapy alone can do,” Machado said in a statement. “The goal of our study is to boost rehabilitation outcomes beyond what physical therapy alone could achieve.”

The patient who underwent the DBS procedure has been sent home and is feeling well, and is in stable condition. They will continue to heal from the brain surgery over the next few weeks and then receive physical therapy.

After a few more weeks, the DBS device will be switched on as the patient continues physical therapy. The Cleveland Clinic team will regularly monitor them to determine if DBS can improve the effects of physical therapy.

The team will also use noninvasive imaging and electrophysiological techniques to study how stimulation affects brain activity. They are hoping to get a better understanding of its therapeutic mechanisms and how to best optimize delivery.

Machado patented the DBS method for stroke recovery and Boston Scientific owns a license to those patents, and its Vercise DBS system was used for the trial. Cleveland Clinic Innovations established a for-profit spinoff company called Enspire DBS Therapy in 2010 to fund the trial and commercialize the method.

The trial was co-funded by the NIH’s BRAIN Initiative Grant: Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies. It’s among many other projects that are studying human brain activity, including computer programs that may help researchers detect and diagnose autism and Alzheimer’s disease and a cap that uses ultrasound waves to stimulate brain cells.

NIH has given out a total of 100 awards valued at over $70 million to 170 investigators at 60 institutions. Its goal is to develop new tools and technologies to better understand the neural circuit function, and capture a dynamic view of the brain in action.