Deans' stroke musings: Facilitation of Auditory Comprehension After Theta Burst Stimulation of Wernicke's Area in Stroke Patients: A Pilot 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.

Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Facilitation of Auditory Comprehension After Theta Burst Stimulation of Wernicke's Area in Stroke Patients: A Pilot Study

Since the effect is transitory you will need to have your doctor and stroke hospital followup with researchers to ensure research on how to make this permanent is done.

Facilitation of Auditory Comprehension After Theta Burst Stimulation of Wernicke's Area in Stroke Patients: A Pilot Study

Viviana Versace^1,2^*,

Kerstin Schwenker^3,4,

Patrick B. Langthaler³,

Stefan Golaszewski^3,4,

Luca Sebastianelli^1,2,

Francesco Brigo^5,6,

Elke Pucks-Faes⁷,

Leopold Saltuari^2,7 and

Raffaele Nardone^3,4,5

¹Department of Neurorehabilitation, Hopsital of Vipiteno-Sterzing, Vipiteno-Sterzing, Italy
²Research Unit for Neurorehabilitation of South Tyrol, Bolzano, Italy
³Department of Neurology, Christian Doppler Klinik, Paracelsus Medical University, Salzburg, Austria
⁴Karl Landsteiner Institut für Neurorehabilitation und Raumfahrtneurologie, Salzburg, Austria
⁵Department of Neurology, Franz Tappeiner Hospital, Merano, Italy
⁶Department of Neuroscience, Biomedicine and Movement Science, University of Verona, Verona, Italy
⁷Department of Neurology, Hochzirl Hospital, Zirl, Austria

Introduction:

Single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and high-frequency repetitive TMS (rTMS) over Wernicke's area were found to facilitate language functions in right-handed healthy subjects. We aimed at investigating the effects of excitatory rTMS, given as intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS) over left Wernicke's area, on auditory comprehension in patients suffering from fluent aphasia after stroke of the left temporal lobe.

Methods:

We studied 13 patients with chronic fluent aphasia after an ischemic stroke involving Wernicke's area. iTBS was applied in random order to Wernicke's area, the right-hemisphere homologous of Wernicke's area, and the primary visual cortex. Auditory comprehension was blind assessed using the Token test before (T0), 5 (T1), and 40 min (T2) after a single session of iTBS.

Results:

At the first evaluation (T1) after iTBS on left Wernike's area, but not on the contralateral homologous area nor on the primary visual cortex, the scores on the Token test were significantly increased. No significant effects were observed at T2.

Conclusion:

We demonstrated that a single session of excitatory iTBS over Wernicke's area was safe and led to a transient facilitation of auditory comprehension in chronic stroke patients with lesions in the same area. Further studies are needed to establish whether TBS-induced modulation can be enhanced and transformed into longer-lasting effects by means of repeated TBS sessions and by combining TBS with speech and language therapy.