Well shit, this has been known since January, 2013, wrong, since 2011.
Antidepressants may help people recover from stroke even if they are not depressed
What the fuck is it going to take to create a stroke protocol on this and help survivors?.
Our stroke associations have obviously done absolutely nothing.
You as a stroke survivor are fucking screwed since no one is willing to do anything useful for survivors. You may as well contact each stroke association president and ream them out for their absolute incompetence. Maybe schadenfreude will occur to those presidents. We can only hope.
If your hospital doesn't do something about this in the next month you need to call the board of directors and have them fire the president and stroke department head. This needs to be a fireable offense.
Matt Lopez, president of the NSA?
Dr. Mariel Jessup, president of the ASA?
WSO President - Steve Davis (Australia)?
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-08-mice-potential-antidepressant-victims.html
Working with mice, researchers at Johns
Hopkins have added to evidence that a commonly prescribed antidepressant
called fluoxetine helps stroke victims improve movement and
coordination, and possibly why.Specifically,
the researchers say, their experiments suggest the drug, often sold
under the trade name Prozac, prolongs the time after a stroke during
which physical therapy remains effective for recovering lost motor
function.
The study, which may help explain the benefit of selective serotonin
reuptake inhibitors already seen in stroke patients, holds potentially
great value for those too ill immediately after an ischemic stroke
to start the intensive rehabilitation therapy needed to recover lost
motor functions. Ischemic strokes are marked by the sudden loss of blood
circulation to the brain caused by a clot.
"For rehabilitation to be effective, it needs to start as soon after a
stroke as possible," says Steven Zeiler, M.D., Ph.D., assistant
professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine and lead author of the study reported in the October issue of
the journal Stroke. "But with this study, we've shown that in mice, we can extend the time period during which rehabilitative intervention has an effect on meaningful recovery."
An estimated 65 percent of stroke survivors experience some weakness
or paralysis of their limbs, and difficulty in walking and moving due to
the death of brain cells from lack of blood flow. Rehabilitation
involves retraining other parts of the brain to take over and restore
lost functions. Zeiler worked with John Krakauer, M.D., who directs the
Brain, Learning, Animation and Movement Lab, to show that in mice, such
behavioral efforts work best when they begin early and at high dosages.
Numerous research studies have reached similar conclusions, Zeiler says.
For the current study, his team tested whether mice with induced
strokes given fluoxetine would get the same recovery results even when
rehab was delayed.
A 2011 study of patients who took fluoxetine after an ischemic stroke—called "Fluoxetine for motor recovery after acute ischemic stroke,"
or FLAME—suggested that the strategy could work. "We took the results
of the success found in the FLAME study and reverse-engineered it to
look at what fluoxetine may be doing," says Zeiler. "Nobody knows how
fluoxetine worked in those patients' stroke recovery—only that it did
and it does."
The mouse model the researchers used involved training mice to do a
task they don't normally do: reach through a slit to grab a food pellet.
"As primates, we make this motion all the time," says Zeiler, "but
quadrupeds, like cats, dogs and mice, aren't so good at it." Once the
trained mice became good at it, the researchers induced a stroke in the
motor area that affected the mice's ability to do that task.
To test whether the mice properly modeled human stroke patients,
Zeiler started rehab with some of the mice immediately after the induced
stroke. As with human stroke patients,
early intervention made a difference: Those mice soon recovered the
lost motor function. Mice for which rehab was delayed by a week showed
incomplete recovery, gaining back a little less than one-half of their
former ability.
"For patients," says Zeiler, "incomplete recovery means weakness or a
loss of control in the affected body part or region." For the mice, it
meant that they knocked the food pellet from the holder, dropped it or
otherwise lost control of it.
When the researchers administered fluoxetine daily to the mice
beginning 24 hours after inducing stroke, however, the mice recovered
the ability to do the learned task even if they started rehab after a
week's delay.
Zeiler emphasizes that the precise cause of fluoxetine's effect on
stroke recovery is not yet known, but he says that after looking at
brain tissue from his study's mice, he thinks the drug changed the way
their brains responded to retraining. "We believe the drug is changing
plasticity," says Zeiler, "changing the way individual neurons are
responding to sensory input after the stroke."
"There are some who believe fluoxetine can reduce the amount of brain
tissue that dies after a stroke," says Zeiler, but his team's findings
do not bear that out. "In fact," Zeiler says, "there was more—not
less—brain tissue death in the animals that got fluoxetine than in those
that did not. We didn't predict that, but the fact that the animals
actually got better—despite increased cell death—tells us that
fluoxetine is having some pretty amazing effects."
"Time still matters; it's key," cautions Zeiler. The mice that fully recovered motor function
were started on fluoxetine immediately after the induced stroke; if
fluoxetine administration was delayed by one week after stroke, instead
of 24 hours, the mice did not fully recover.
Like all drugs, Zeiler notes, fluoxetine can have negative side effects. Still, Zeiler says, stroke doctors at Johns Hopkins recommend it for stroke patients, especially those who suffer motor loss. "But it's not something that a patient would be prescribed forever," he adds.
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