Highly educated people face steeper mental declines after stroke

 Really? I made it within 2 classes of getting a masters and I have had zero decline in my mental capacity. It is like Charly in the movie 'Charly' adapted from the book Flowers for Algernon.  He became extremely smart due to the drug and recognized the upcoming cognitive decline when the mice receiving the drug began declining. He was smart enough to know what the hell was going to happen down the road; becoming stupid again.

Flowers for Algernon (6 posts to February 2014)

I would recognize my cognitive decline post stroke and INSIST MY FUCKING INCOMPETENT DOCTORS FIX THAT!

Highly educated people face steeper mental declines after stroke

                     Identifying which stroke patients are at the highest risk for cognitive decline will help target future interventions, researchers say

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Michigan Medicine - University of Michigan 

When someone has a stroke, it can accelerate the loss of cognitive ability over the coming years.

Stroke survivors who have attended some level of higher education may face even steeper mental declines, according to a study led by Michigan Medicine.

In an analysis of cognitive outcomes for more than 2,000 patients seen for stroke between 1971 and 2019, college graduates performed better on initial post-stroke examinations of global cognition, a measure of overall cognitive ability that includes mental functions like memory, attention and processing speed.

However, stroke survivors who attended any level of higher education had faster declines in executive functioning — skills used to manage everyday tasks, such as working memory and problem solving — compared to patients with less than a high school degree.

“Brain atrophy occurs over time regardless of education level,” said Mellanie V. Springer, M.D., M.S., first author and Thomas H and Susan C Brown Early Career Professor of Neurology at University of Michigan Medical School.

“Our findings suggest that attending higher education may enable people to retain greater cognitive ability until a critical threshold of brain injury is reached after a stroke. At this point, compensation may fail, and rapid cognitive decline occurs.”

For years, researchers have considered education level as a predictor of cognitive reserve, the ability to preserve higher levels of functioning despite brain injury that occurs over the course of life.

This led Springer and her colleagues to hypothesize that highly educated people would have slower cognitive decline after a stroke.

The results, published in JAMA Network Open, reflect the opposite.

“Dementia is a greater threat after a first stroke than having another stroke,” said senior author Deborah A. Levine, M.D., M.P.H., professor of internal medicine and neurology at U-M Medical School. 

“We lack treatments that prevent or slow cognitive decline and dementia after stroke. This study increases our understanding and generates potential hypotheses about the causes of post-stroke cognitive decline and which patients face higher risks of it.”

Having a higher number of the ApoE4 allele, a genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, did not affect the association between education level and cognitive decline after stroke. The number of strokes a person suffered also did not affect the relationship.

This means, notes Springer, that the critical point of brain injury at which cognitive compensation fails in the highly educated does not depend on underlying genetic risk and can be reached after a single stroke.

“Identifying which stroke patients are at the highest risk for cognitive decline will help target future interventions to slow cognitive decline,” Springer said.

Additional authors: Rachel T Whitney, Ph.D., Wen Ye, Ph.D., Emily M. Briceño, Ph.D., Rebecca A. Ferber, Bruno Giordani, Ph.D., Rodney A. Hayward, M.D., Adam S. Kollipara, M.P.H., and Jeremy B. Sussman, M.D., M.S., all of University of Michigan, see remaining authors online.

Funding/disclosures: This research was supported by National Institute on Aging (RF1AG068410) and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (K01NS11755), of the National Institutes of Health.

The National Institute on Aging was not involved in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, or interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or the decision to submit the manuscript for publication. A representative of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke is a co-author on the manuscript and reviewed the manuscript for intellectual content but was not directly involved in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, or interpretation of the data; preparation or approval of the manuscript; or the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Paper cited: “Education Levels and Poststroke Cognitive Trajectories,” JAMA Network Open. DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.2002

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Journal

JAMA Network Open

DOI

10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.2002 

Creating super intelligence or enhancing the brains of patients with neurological disorders through brain augmentation

You will need this since you will need to become like Charly in Flowers for Algernon and research the solutions to all the problems in stroke since our stroke medical professionals don't even have that as a goal. 
Creating super intelligence or enhancing the brains of patients with neurological disorders through brain augmentation

New research published in Frontiers in Neuroscience discusses the facts, fiction and controversy surrounding brain augmentation. 

Creating super intelligence or enhancing the brains of patients with neurological disorders through brain augmentation is currently a hot topic in both scientific literature and the media. This is a remarkable development because just a decade or two ago the idea of brain augmentation was reserved for science fiction. But with the rapid development of neuroscience and related technological and medical fields, many of the past decade’s science fiction themes – such as reading out brain content, sending information to the brain, inter-connecting different brains and adding artificial parts to the brain – are becoming real.

Broadly speaking, the themes of brain augmentation can be divided into three categories:  firstly, approaches that involve recording and decoding brain activity, secondly, approaches that include various ways to stimulate the brain, and finally, futuristic and philosophical considerations around the topic.

So how close are we to brain augmentation approaches that may help in the treatment of neurological and mental conditions, such as paralysis, sensory, motor and cognitive disabilities, or Parkinson’s disease, or to creating super intelligence and enhancing productivity in healthy people who want to excel in their performance?

Recently, more than 600 authors contributed almost 150 research articles investigating brain augmentation – on everything from brain-machine interfaces, neuro-stimulators, the application of neuro-pharmacology and ethical and philosophical considerations around brain enhancement that may seem relatively unimportant today, but given the rapid development of this field, they will become very real and practical in the near future.

The editors of this Research Topic—The augmentation of brain function: facts, fiction and controversy published in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience—Dr Mikhail Lebedev, from Duke University in the United States, Dr Ioan Opris at the University of Miami School of Medicine and Dr Manuel Casanova at the University of Louisville, also in the U.S. are proud of this comprehensive collection of articles which raise key themes directly related to practical issues around brain enhancement – particularly pertaining to public health.

Indeed, Dr Opris says that the strength of research is in the synergy of collaboration, “Sharing each other’s research is like polishing a diamond and providing new faces to shine”, a sentiment echoed by Dr Casanova, “Research findings need to be communicated in order to be relevant. Personally, communicating our findings forces me to better understand my own results and become critical of them. Sharing my research pushes me to establish a different frame of mind as a writer one that includes other researchers and even lay people.”

One original research paper, Donor/recipient enhancement of memory in rat hippocampus by Dr Sam Deadwyler from the U.S. Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winstom-Salem, New Carolina and his colleagues describes a donor-recipient memory transfer. In this stunning experiment, a donor rat was required to perform a behavioral task requiring memorization. They then decoded the memory content from the hippocampus of the donor rat and, using electrical micro-stimulation, transferred it to the hippocampus of another rat. After the donor rat’s neural activity was processed by a multiple-input multiple-output model, and delivered to the recipient’s brain, the recipient rat successfully reproduced the task behavior.

The authors say that their research provides the basis for utilizing extracted appropriate neural information from one brain to induce, recover, or enhance memory related processing in the brain of another subject and that the results provide important insight for extending donor/recipient procedures to functions performed by other brain regions and other behavioral endpoints, and eventually to similar circumstances involving humans.

In another paper, Transcranial direct current stimulation: five important issues we aren’t discussing (but probably should be), around Dr. Jared Horvath from the University of Melbourne in Australia, discusses several important issues related to the use of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)—constant, low current delivered to the brain area of interest via electrodes on the scalp—as a cognitive enhancement approach. It was originally developed to help patients with brain injuries or psychiatric conditions like a major depressive disorder.

Dr Horvath and his colleagues outline a number of important experimental and technical issues associated with tDCS that they say are simply not being discussed in any meaningful manner. These include the need for an individualized, patient by patient approach to tDCS, the importance of proper controls in tDCS studies, such as sham stimulation and blinding, the interference of motor and cognitive activities with the tDCS effects and changes in electric current related to hair thickness and electrode attachments methods. They argue that if the field of tDCS is to avoid becoming a footnote in the annals of neuro-scientific research it’s time to collectively acknowledge well-known shortcomings and use these issues to guide further research and exploration and well as more comprehensive protocols.

A third paper of the 149 submitted explores something that we all love – sleep! In the paper Sleep for cognitive enhancement, Dr Susanne Diekelmann from the Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology at the University of Tubingen in Germany reviews enhancing the potential of sleep for such cognitive functions as attention, language, reasoning, decision making, learning and memory. The article discusses the role of sleep in memory consolidation and the acquisition of new memories after sleep, the role of sleep-specific brain oscillations in these processes and neurotransmitters involved.

Dr Diekelmann suggests that memory processing during sleep can be augmented by cueing memory reactivation with olfactory and auditory cues, electrically inducing sleep-specific brain oscillations, and modulating specific neurotransmitter systems pharmacologically.

At the end of the day, Dr Lebedev says this Research Topic would not have been possible elsewhere, “It was only because of Frontiers publishing model that we were able to compile this collection of articles from the best experts in several disciplines. As far as I can tell, all of our 629 authors enjoyed working with Frontiers, and everybody is looking forward to this research topic published as three eBook volumes: one devoted to decoding of brain signals, the other to neurostimulation approaches to augmentation of brain function, and the third one on futuristic ideas and ethical issues. Judging from the number of page views (more than 700,000 at the moment), this research topic evoked significant interest in our open-access readership, in both the scientific community and the general public. The number of citations is constantly growing for these articles, so hopefully they will be of great educational and scientific value for students, researchers, health care practitioners, and people interested in studies of the brain”.

43 second video here:

https://youtu.be/HVd4-KMDeD0

Now More Of Us Can Count On More Time Dodging The Dementia Bullet

I'm doing as much as I can to dodge that problem; coffee, coffee, coffee, exercise, social connections, lots of salmon. If only our stroke medical professionals would come up with a protocol to prevent this. It is a sequelae to stroke and thus should be their responsibility, but they will do nothing just like they are doing nothing to solve all the problems in stroke. Depending on whether I'm like Cliff Robertson in 'Charly' and know how smart I was and will be declining. That would make me unhappy.
Now More Of Us Can Count On More Time Dodging The Dementia Bullet

by Judith Graham May 24

You’ve turned 65 and exited middle age. What are the chances you’ll develop cognitive impairment or dementia in the years ahead?

New research about “cognitive life expectancy” — how long older adults live with good versus declining brain health — shows that after age 65 men and women spend more than a dozen years in good cognitive health, on average. And, over the past decade, that time span has been expanding.

By contrast, cognitive challenges arise in a more compressed time frame in later life, with mild cognitive impairment (problems with memory, decision-making or thinking skills) lasting about four years, on average, and dementia (Alzheimer’s disease or other related conditions) occurring over 1½ to two years.

Even when these conditions surface, many seniors retain an overall sense of well-being, according to new research presented last month at the Population Association of America’s annual meeting.

“The majority of cognitively impaired years are happy ones, not unhappy ones,” said Anthony Bardo, a co-author of that study and assistant professor of sociology at the University of Kentucky-Lexington.

The Clear Sign That You Will NOT Develop Dementia

So your doctor should be giving you the signs for dementia you should be looking for. I bet you get nothing on dementia from your stroke doctor. Just like Charly in Flowers for Algernon.

My self-awareness is definitely high enough to recognize any upcoming cognitive problems.
The Clear Sign That You Will NOT Develop Dementia

Risk of developing dementia is one-third lower.

Memory often worsens with age — it is a normal part of the aging process. But, when do mild memory problems signal the onset of Alzheimer’s? Ironically, people who realise their memory is getting worse are less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease, new research finds. Self-awareness, then, is a healthy sign. Doctors have long suspected that people who seem unaware of their memory problems are at higher risk of dementia, but this is one of the first studies to demonstrate it. Researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, looked at data from 450 patients experiencing mild memory deficits.

The patients’ experience of their own memory was compared with the objective views of friends and family.

Patients unaware of their memory problems turned out to be in worse shape neurologically: they had metabolic dysfunction in their brains and more amyloid proteins (these are linked to Alzheimer’s). Two years later, patients who were more unaware of their memory problems were at triple the risk of developing dementia. Dr Serge Gauthier, study co-author, said: “This has practical applications for clinicians: people with mild memory complaints should have an assessment that takes into account information gathered from reliable informants, such as family members or close friends.”

Can a Daily Pill Really Boost Your Brain Power?

I don't know, but is your doctor and hospital actively looking into this for stroke survivors?
The historical movies 'Limitless' and the 1968 film 'Charly', and 'Flowers For Algernon' already prove the possibilities.
Can a Daily Pill Really Boost Your Brain Power?

Narrow Arteries Could Cloud Mind

Well hell, my right carotid artery is so narrow no blood gets thru at all. I must be massively cognitively impaired. Prepare the fainting couch. With a complete Circle of Willis narrow carotid arteries would have zero impact on cognition.

Narrow Arteries Could Cloud Mind

Among other things, she told MedPage Today, it opens the possibility that revascularization of the carotid might rescue some cognitively impaired people. Look at that, they could open up that artery and it might rescue me from cognitive impairment. That idea is a complete bunch of bullshit if your Circle of Willis is complete!
Sounds like 'Flowers for Algernon' and 'Charly'. Don't make me smart, I'll just fall into a vast depression when I become stupid again.

Stroke Speeds Long-Term Brain Deficits

Does this mean I'm going to lose my mind like Charley did in the movie adaption 'Charly' from the book Flowers for Algernon? I guess I'll have to hurry up and accomplish everything I want to do before I become a blithering idiot. (No snide comments, I'm sensitive) No wonder doctors treat us like children.
Stroke Speeds Long-Term Brain Deficits

Stroke not only acutely attacks the mind, but also hastens its decline, long-term cognitive testing showed.
Global cognition and executive function decreased significantly faster after a stroke than seen among those the same age without a stroke, Deborah Levine, MD, MPH, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and colleagues found.
Other measures, such as new learning and verbal memory, also showed acute drops, but without significantly accelerated worsening thereafter, the researchers reported here at the International Stroke Conference (ISC).
"Regardless of whether there was an acute drop and/or a change in slope," Levine told MedPage Today, "the changes are so significant that it will take years for stroke survivors to recover that lost cognitive function, if they do at all." I lost nothing mentally from my stroke.
Long-term cognitive impacts of stroke won't likely come as a surprise to many in the field, she acknowledged, though it hadn't been proven that the stroke is still worsening cognition years afterward.

Action Points

• Note that these studies were published as abstracts and presented at a conference. These data and conclusions should be considered to be preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More at link.