Deans' stroke musings: New CT technique identifies blood vessel plaque

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 13, 2017

New CT technique identifies blood vessel plaque

With this in place your doctor can determine the best way to treat it. My doctors never found my 80% blockage of the right carotid artery, leaving me at extreme risk of another stroke until it totally closed up. Some possibilities:
Do you want the lawnmower?
http://www.articlecity.com/videos/health/Lawnmower-For-Clogged-Arteries-175286465.php
Or Drano? I would be worried about this, sloughing off chunks
http://www.ivanhoe.com/channels/p_channelstory.cfm?storyid=26404
Or conventional?
http://video.answers.com/learn-about-coronary-bypass-surgery-286302728
Or;

Israeli study uses gold particles to ‘seek and destroy’ artery blockages

New CT technique identifies blood vessel plaque

By Kate Madden Yee, AuntMinnie.com staff writer

July 13, 2017 -- A new CT technique can measure blood vessel inflammation, allowing doctors to identify and treat patients at risk for cardiovascular disease, according to a U.K. study published online July 12 in Science Translational Medicine.

Cardiovascular disease accounts for one in every four deaths in the U.S., but the standard of care for assessing it -- coronary calcium scoring -- identifies hardened arteries when the damage has already become irreversible, and it can't distinguish which blood vessel plaques are prone to rupture.
A team led by Dr. Alexios Antonopoulos, PhD, of the University of Oxford created a method to identify blood vessel inflammation from measurements of fat tissue around arteries using CT. The technique uses a "fat attenuation index" (FAI), which is based on changes in fat cell size that correlated with markers of blood vessel inflammation in samples from 453 patients undergoing cardiac surgery. Among these patients, increased FAI correlated with blood vessel inflammation in a subset of 40 patients who were also evaluated with PET imaging.
Antonopoulos' group went on to quantify FAI in 273 additional subjects. They found that the marker changed around suspicious lesions in five patients who experienced heart attacks.

A new imaging methodology called FAI identifies inflamed artery lesions that pose the most risk to patients. Image courtesy of Antonopoulos et al and Science Translational Medicine.

If ongoing follow-up studies confirm the prognostic value of FAI, the metric could transform risk stratification and clinical management for heart disease, according to the researchers.