Looks positive. Now if we had ANY stroke leaders at all they would immediately start clinical trials of this for stroke. But nothing will occur. Our stroke leaders don't exist, they have their heads buried up their asses waiting for SOMEONE ELSE TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM!
WHY IS YOUR STROKE HOSPITAL SO FUCKING INCOMPETENT?
Doctors Use Electrical Implant to Aid Brain-Damaged Woman
A pilot study offers “a very promising start” in the effort to help people recover from traumatic brain injuries.
A
colored magnetic resonance image of a healthy brain, with the thalamus
highlighted. Stimulation to the thalamus helped a woman with a brain
injury regain some function.CreditScott Camazine & Sue Trainor/Science Source
Image
More
than 3 million Americans live with disabling brain injuries. The vast
majority of these individuals are lost to the medical system soon after
their initial treatment, to be cared for by family or to fend for
themselves, managing fatigue, attention and concentration problems with
little hope of improvement.
On Saturday, a team of scientists
reported a glimmer of hope. Using an implant that stimulates activity in
key areas of the brain, they restored near-normal levels of brain
function to a middle-aged woman who was severely injured in a car
accident 18 years ago.
Experts said
the woman was a test case, and that it was far from clear whether the
procedure would prompt improvements for others like her. That group
includes an estimated 3 million to 5 million people, many of them
veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with disabilities related
to traumatic brain injuries.
“This is
a pilot study,” said Dr. Steven R. Flanagan, the chairman of the
department of rehabilitation medicine at NYU Langone Health, who was not
part of the research team. “And we certainly cannot generalize from it.
But I think it’s a very promising start, and there is certainly more to
come in this work.”
The
woman, now in her early 40s, was a student when the accident occurred.
She soon recovered sufficiently to live independently. But she suffered
from persistent fatigue and could not read or concentrate for long,
leaving her unable to hold a competitive job, socialize much, or resume
her studies.
She and her family asked to remain anonymous, and the researchers did not reveal further details other than to remark on her improvement.
“Her life has changed,”
said Dr. Nicholas Schiff, a professor of neurology and neuroscience at
Weill Cornell Medicine and a member of the study team. “She is much less
fatigued, and she’s now reading novels. The next patient might not do
as well. But we want keep going to see what happens.”
A
lack of research funding and interest has made that difficult, he
added. “We’ve not been able to do so because there’s an incredible drag
on doing anything for this population,” he said
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Dr.
Schiff and another team leader, Dr. Joseph T. Giacino, director of
rehabilitation neuropsychology at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and
an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, presented the case at a
brain-science convention in Washington, D.C., in an informal, public
session.
The
two collaborated with clinical centers at Stanford and the University
of Utah, and with researchers at the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Jaimie M.
Henderson, a neurosurgeon at Stanford, performed the surgery, and the
team is recruiting other candidates in the Bay Area to see if the
procedure is viable for other people with moderate to severe traumatic
brain injuries.
In the operation,
performed last summer, Dr. Henderson threaded two electrodes into the
thalamus, a switching center deep in the brain. Precision was critical.
Before the surgery, the team did extensive work to identify specific
regions in the brain that support activation of the frontal cortex,
which is involved in thinking and planning, and the basal ganglia, which
supports learning and memory.
“Operating
on the thalamus is pretty routine,” Dr. Henderson said in an email.
“This is a different target, though, and difficult to hit because of its
size and shape. So a bit of extra precision is called for.”
The
electrodes were connected to a pacemaker device, implanted in the
woman’s chest wall, that produced active current for 12 hours a day,
from morning to evening.
The woman
improved gradually, and by three months was consistently scoring about
15 percent better than she had previously on standardized tests of
attention, planning and executive function. She also reported 70 percent
less fatigue on a standard measure, and no longer took daily afternoon
naps, as she had before, the researchers reported.
At
one point during her rehabilitation, the pacemaker accidentally failed,
and her gains tapered off. Doctors quickly restored the current, and
her ability improved.
About one in
five people with similar injuries receive some continuing treatment.
This often includes cognitive therapy — typically, computer-based
training for attention and memory, an hour a week for 12 weeks — and
many see gradual improvements. But that therapy is not easy to access,
and insurers don’t always pay for it.
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