Use the labels in the right column to find what you want. Or you can go thru them one by one, there are only 29,710 posts. Searching is done in the search box in upper left corner. I blog on anything to do with stroke. DO NOT DO ANYTHING SUGGESTED HERE AS I AM NOT MEDICALLY TRAINED, YOUR DOCTOR IS, LISTEN TO THEM. BUT I BET THEY DON'T KNOW HOW TO GET YOU 100% RECOVERED. I DON'T EITHER BUT HAVE PLENTY OF QUESTIONS FOR YOUR DOCTOR TO ANSWER.
Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain!trillions and trillions of neuronsthatDIEeach day because there areNOeffective 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.
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
Nerve implant 'restores consciousness' to man in persistant vegetative state
On the right, the warmer colours indicate an increase in connectivity
following vagus nerve stimulation among brain regions responsible for
planned movements, spatial reasoning and attention.
Illustration: Corazzol et al.
A 35-year-old man who had been in a persistant vegetative state (PVS)
for 15 years has shown signs of consciousness after receiving a
pioneering therapy involving nerve stimulation.
The treatment challenges a widely-accepted view that there is no
prospect of a patient recovering consciousness if they have been in PVS
for longer than 12 months.
Since sustaining severe brain injuries in a car accident, the man had
been completely unaware of the world around him. But when fitted with
an implant to stimulate the vagus nerve, which travels into the brain
stem, the man appeared to flicker back into a state of consciousness.
He started to track objects with his eyes, began to stay awake while
being read a story and his eyes opened wide in surprise when the
examiner suddenly moved her face close to the patient’s. He could even
respond to some simple requests, such as turning his head when asked –
although this took about a minute.
Angela Sirigu, who led the work at the Institut des Sciences
Cognitives Marc Jeannerod in Lyon, France, said: “He is still paralysed,
he cannot talk, but he can respond. Now he is more aware.”
Niels Birbaumer, of the University of Tübingen and a pioneer of
brain-computer interfaces to help patients with neurological disorders
communicate, said the findings, published in the journal Current Biology,
raised pressing ethical issues. “Many of these patients may and will
have been neglected, and passive euthanasia may happen often in a
vegetative state,” he said. “This paper is a warning to all those
believing that this state is hopeless after a year.”
The vagus nerve,
which the treatment targeted, connects the brain to almost all the
vital organs in the body, running from the brain stem down both sides of
the neck, across the chest and into the abdomen. In the brain, it is
linked directly to two regions known to play roles in alertness and
consciousness.
In surgery lasting about 20 minutes, a small implant was placed
around the vagus nerve in the man’s neck. After one month of vagal nerve
stimulation, the patient’s attention, movements and brain activity
significantly improved and he had shifted into a state of minimal consciousness.
Recordings of brain activity also revealed major changes, with signs
of increased electrical communication between brain regions and
significantly more activity in areas linked to movement, sensation and
awareness.
Similar stimulation has already been shown to help some patients with epilepsy and depression.
Sirigu and her team now hope to apply the same technique to patients
with less serious brain injuries, where even more substantial
improvements might be possible. There may even be patients, she said,
whose cortex (the part of the brain used for cognitive tasks) is intact,
but who have brain stem injuries that have led to limited awareness or
consciousness.
The findings offer hope to the families of patients in PVS that it
may one day be possible to re-establish some basic form of
communication. However, some might also question whether such patients
would wish to be made more acutely aware of being in a severely injured
state.
“I cannot answer to this question,” said Sirigu. “Personally I think
it’s better to be aware, even if it’s a bad state, to be conscious of
what’s happening. Then you can have a decision if you want to go on or
if you want [euthanasia].”
Damian Cruse, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of
Birmingham, described the findings as “pretty exciting”, adding that in
future it might be possible to combine vagal nerve stimulation with
other forms of rehabilitation.
“If you can just push the patient over the threshold so they can
start responding to external stimulation you can maybe help them follow
speech therapy and get them to a level where they can start to
communicate,” he said.
During the past decade, scientists have made major advances in communicating with “locked in” patients using various forms of brain-computer interface.
These have allowed paralysed patients, some of whom had been assumed
to be in PVS, to answer “yes” or “no” to questions to let their family
and friends know their wishes and their state of wellbeing.
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