Deans' stroke musings: Modified-Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction as a Treatment for Cognitive Recovery in Patients with Minor Stroke: a Randomized Controlled 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.

Monday, August 11, 2025

Modified-Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction as a Treatment for Cognitive Recovery in Patients with Minor Stroke: a Randomized Controlled Pilot Study

Why are you doing something as stupid as this when the correct solution is 100% recovery protocols? Your mentors don't know how to solve stroke? YOU don't know what survivors want? Like 100% recovery!

Damn it all: stroke is easy; 5 steps.
1. Describe the problems exactly. There are tens of thousands of pieces of research already hinting at solutions, just need followup.
2. Write thousands of RFPs to researchers/MIT grads to solve those problems.
3. Fund them with foundation grants.
4. Write stroke rehab protocols based on the research.
5. Get the Nobel prize in medicine.

Modified-Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction as a Treatment for Cognitive Recovery in Patients with Minor Stroke: a Randomized Controlled Pilot Study

Sophia GirgentiSophia Girgenti1Isabella DallastaIsabella Dallasta1Erin LawrenceErin Lawrence1Dawn MerbachDawn Merbach1Jonathan Z SimonJonathan Z Simon2Rafael H LlinasRafael H Llinas1Neda F GouldNeda F Gould1Elisabeth Breese MarshElisabeth Breese Marsh1*

1Johns Hopkins Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States

2University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, Maryland, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Background:

Well-developed rehabilitation paradigms exist for post-stroke language and motor impairments. However, no such recovery program has been identified for commonly disabling cognitive deficits in patients following minor stroke. Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is thought to engage the frontal lobes, improving concentration and attention, and therefore may be an effective option.We prospectively enrolled a cohort of patients with subacute minor stroke and randomized them to either an 8-week online modified-MBSR course or online traditional Stroke Support Group (SSG). All patients underwent a battery of cognitive tests and measures of patient reported outcomes (PROs) pre-and post-intervention. ANOVA was used to compare changes in scores over time across both groups, along with a third group of control patients having received neither intervention (n=128).

Results:

A total of 30 patients were randomized (n=16 for m-MBSR; n=14 for SSG). The average age of the cohort was 65.9 years. Post-intervention, both groups demonstrated significantly improved T-scores on cognitive tasks, regardless of intervention. Compared to SSG, the m-MBSR group showed a larger degree of improvement in processing speed, executive, and global cognitive function; however, the difference between groups was not statistically significant. Engagement level was not associated with better clinical scores, though was unexpectedly low for both groups.

Conclusions:

m-MBSR may modestly improve frontal lobe activity and demonstrates some success in increasing cognitive performance. However, further studies are needed to determine if it is more efficacious in the chronic stage of recovery when more patients are able to fully engage and actively participate.

Keywords: Stroke, Recovery, mindfulness, function, Cognitive networks, Cognition

Received: 25 Nov 2024; Accepted: 10 Aug 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Girgenti, Dallasta, Lawrence, Merbach, Simon, Llinas, Gould and Marsh. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Elisabeth Breese Marsh, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 21218, Maryland, United States

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.