Deans' stroke musings: Outcomes after stroke in patients receiving adjuvant therapy with traditional Chinese medicine: A nationwide matched interventional cohort study

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, April 21, 2016

Outcomes after stroke in patients receiving adjuvant therapy with traditional Chinese medicine: A nationwide matched interventional cohort study

This didn't seem to measure anything that directly resulted from the stroke; hemiplegia, aphasia, cognition, spasticity, fatigue, except for mortality. So it seems the whole point was to put stroke in the title to confuse people and make them think TCM was useful for stroke.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26593214

Chang CC¹, Chen TL¹, Elley Chiu H², Hu CJ³, Yeh CC⁴, Tsai CC⁵, Lane HL⁵, Sun MF⁶, Sung FC⁷, Liao CC⁸, Lin JG⁶, Shih CC⁹.

Author information

Abstract

ETHNOPHARMACOLOGICAL RELEVANCE:

The use of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) was high in stroke patients but limited information was available on whether TCM is effective on post-stroke outcomes. The aim of this study is to compare the outcomes of stroke patients with and without receiving adjuvant TCM therapy.

MATERIALS AND METHODS:

Using Taiwan's National Health Insurance Research Database, we conducted a nationwide cohort study and selected hospitalized stroke patients receiving routine care with (n=1734) and without (n=1734) in-hospital adjuvant TCM therapy by propensity score matching procedures. The adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of poststroke complications and mortality associated with in-hospital adjuvant TCM therapy were calculated. The use of medical resource was also compared between stroke patients with and without adjuvant TCM therapy.

RESULTS:

Compared with hospitalized stroke patients receiving routine care alone, hospitalized stroke patients receiving routine care and adjuvant TCM therapy exhibited decreased risks of urinary tract infection (HR 0.82, 95% CI 0.68-1.00), pneumonia (HR 0.60, 95% CI 0.47-0.76), epilepsy (HR 0.67, 95% CI 0.49-0.96), gastrointestinal hemorrhage (HR 0.68, 95% CI 0.47-0.98), and mortality (HR 0.37, 95% CI 0.19-0.70) within 3 months after stroke admission. The corresponding 6-month HRs for urinary tract infection, pneumonia, gastrointestinal hemorrhage, and mortality were 0.83, 0.63, 0.64, and 0.40, respectively. Less use and expenditure of hospitalization were found in those received adjuvant TCM therapy.

CONCLUSIONS:

Hospitalized stroke patients who received routine care and adjuvant TCM therapy exhibited reduced adverse outcomes after admission within a 6-month follow-up period.