Call for new members of the International Stroke Journal (IJS) Editorial Board

I would suggest applying but likely you are not a WSO member and thus have nothing to say regarding stroke! Only hoity-toity researchers need apply,  survivors mean nothing.

Call for new members of the International Stroke Journal (IJS) Editorial Board

The International Stroke Journal (IJS) is the flagship journal of the World Stroke Organisation (WSO). It is one of top ranked stroke journals with a rapidly increasing impact; a current impact factor of 6.7, and Citescore of 12.3, placing it in the top 10% of Clinical Neurology journals on both metrics. We are looking for new members to serve on the IJS Editorial Board. Up to eight new members will be added to the board during 2013/4 The IJS is a truly global stroke journal and applications are welcome from any country/region in the world. The selection of new board members will be done by the IJS editorial team. Positions will be for 5 years, with possible renewal for a further 5 year term.

Applicants should be stroke scientists, willing to review up to 10 manuscripts annually, and willing to actively support the promotion and growth of the journal. We particularly welcome individuals who can not only help with reviewing, but can also help with new ideas to increase the wider impact and relevance of the journal. We welcome both candidates who are early career researchers, as well as established researchers. We would expect applicants to have experience in both publishing stroke research, and in reviewing for stroke/neurology journals.

Nominations for the board should be sent by 4 December 2023 to Hugh Markus, Editor in Chief of the IJS on: hmarkus@world-stroke.org

The application document should be a pdf of MAXIMUM 2 pages. It should include name, contact details, and current position, brief CV (up to 200 words), orchid-ID, Web of Science, Scopus, or Google Scholar metrics, and fields of interest in stroke (up to 5 topics), experience of reviewing, and a statement/motivation section (up to 200 words).

We look forward to your receiving your applications.

Scientific fields don't advance if too many papers are published.

 From Deric Bownds MindBlog. Is this the problem in stroke? Or do the leading researchers need to die?

Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?

The latest here:

Scientific fields don't advance if too many papers are published.

Formsense Smart Ring to Quantify Rehab Outcomes in Stroke Survivors

 And we have world-renowned researchers that don't understand that this is worthless since all it is doing is monitoring. Survivors don't need monitoring, they NEED EXACT STROKE PROTOCOLS THAT DELIVER 100% RECOVERY. Please talk to survivors sometime instead of your insular circles. 

Formsense Smart Ring to Quantify Rehab Outcomes in Stroke Survivors

 

Formsense, a leading wearable technology and smart apparel company, has been chosen as technology partner for a $2.4M grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that includes an interdisciplinary team of world-renowned researchers in rehabilitation sciences.

Prof. Sunghoon (Ivan) Lee, a health informatician from UMass Amherst’s Institute of Applied Life Sciences (IALS) is the Principal Investigator of the grant, supported by Prof. Paolo Bonato and Randi Black-Schaffer from Harvard Medical School - and human-centered mHealth design expert - Eun Kyoung Choe from the University of Maryland iSchool and Human-Computer Interaction Lab - as well as Nathan Ramasarma, founder and CEO of Formsense.

This grant will help deploy and test a novel mobile health (mHealth) system, leveraging Formsense’s wearable sensor that slips on a finger like a ring, to monitor and encourage movement and activity in the weak upper limb of stroke survivors in an ambulatory setting. For several years, Formsense and its University partners tested the use of this novel solution validating its capability of monitoring both gross-arm and fine-hand movements clinically relevant to track and assess activities of daily living (ADLs) for affected patients.

“As a research-driven company, Formsense supports early and strong collaborations in academia in order to validate its technologies and explore commercial solutions that can accelerate adoption in the market,” says Ramasarma, whose San Diego-based company develops wearable sensor technologies that objectively measure human performance in health, fitness, and sport. “The vision of Formsense was always to improve the quality of people’s lives and the confirmation of this grant from the NIH is particularly gratifying to me and the whole team at Formsense.”

Tracking and mapping the health of damaged organs

If our researchers aren't doing this with their stem cell testing they should be defunded.

Tracking and mapping the health of damaged organs

Medical treatments for a variety of diseases have advanced dramatically in recent decades, but sometimes they come with a cost; namely damage to surrounding tissues and organs. That’s where stem cell research and regenerative medicine come in. Those fields seek to develop new ways of repairing the damage. But how do you see if those repairs are working? Researchers at Purdue say they have found a way to do just that.
The researchers have developed a 3D technology that allows them to track, map and monitor what happens with cells and tissues that are being used to repair damage caused by disease or the treatment for the disease. By observing the cells and tissues they can see if they are staying where they are needed and if they are working.
The technology, published in the journal ACS Nano, uses tiny sensors placed on a flexible scaffold to monitor the new materials in the body. Ingeniously the scaffold is buoyant, so it can float and survive in the wet conditions found in many parts of the body.
In a news release, Chi Hwan Lee, the leader of the research team, says the device could help millions of people:
“Tissue engineering already provides new hope for hard-to-treat disorders, and our technology brings even more possibilities. This device offers an expanded set of potential options to monitor cell and tissue function after surgical transplants in diseased or damaged bodies. Our technology offers diverse options for sensing and works in moist internal body environments that are typically unfavorable for electronic instruments.”
Purdue created this video showing the device and explaining how it works.

Artificially Created Tiny Human Brains Show Signs of Neural Activity

Which built brain should our researchers be using? I expect our researchers to be using the best one.

• Brain on a chip (6)
• brain organoid (1)
• brain in a dish (10)
• brain in a lab (2)

 

 

Artificially Created Tiny Human Brains Show Signs of Neural Activity

"I was very excited to see some of the neurons activated at the same time robustly at first."

By Yasmin Tayag

on June 28, 2019

Filed Under Neuroscience

All human experience is rooted in the brain, but we just barely understand how it works. That’s partially because it’s hard to study: Scientists can’t just run experiments on living brains, and experiments on animal brains don’t always translate to humans. That’s why researchers developed the brain organoid, an artificially grown, three-dimensional cluster of human neurons that faithfully mimics brain development — and, as Japanese scientists reported Wednesday in Cell Stem Cell, the neural activity of a living brain as well.

Neurons in a living brain respond to stimuli by “firing” off electrical impulses, which they use to communicate with one another and with other parts of the body. The scientists behind the new paper discovered that the brain organoids they grew from scratch in their lab also started to exhibit synchronized activity, just like neurons in an actual brain. That team included first and co-corresponding author Hideya Sakaguchi, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at Kyoto University currently at the Salk Institute.

“I was very excited to see some of the neurons activated at the same time robustly at first,” Sakaguchi, who did the first of his experiments in December 2016, tells Inverse. “Neurons first show individual activities, but as they form networks and connections between other neurons, they start to show synchronized activities.”

This, he explains, is the basis of human brain function. But he’s not worried that his organoids are at any risk of becoming conscious.

Why Brain Activity Matters

In 1949, the Canadian neuropsychologist Donald Hebb, Ph.D., introduced the Cell Assembly Hypothesis, which posited that synchronized neural activity was the basis for various brain functions, including memory. In 1992, the authors of a Science report put it more succinctly: “Neurons wire together if they fire together.” Using their new technique for measuring brain cell activity, Sakaguchi and his team found that brain organoids do the same, even if they’re grown from scratch in a dish.

Their “mini brains” were technically “cerebral organoids,” made from the cells that compose the region of the brain known as the cerebrum. They started out as clusters of stem cells raised in a special medium designed to support brain development, eventually growing into organoids with a similar structure as a real-life cerebrum.

Then, Sakaguchi and his team pulled out some neurons from the organoids and grew them separately, in hopes that this new culture, called a functional neural network, would last longer than the full mini brain and would be less challenging for visualizing dynamic function. It was in this simpler culture that the team watched the neurons cluster and self-organize, spontaneously creating the structure that would support the synchronized activity. Then, “at last,” says Sakaguchi, “I saw very interesting neural function via imaging.”

“The activity in a dish is still preliminary compared with real brain,” he says, “and I think the activity that we detect might correspond to very early stage of cerebral development in a brain.”

It isn’t, he assures Inverse, evidence that the brain is thinking.

Why Brain Organoids Can’t Be Conscious

Growing human brain cells is controversial in part because some people worry that consciousness may arise from them, as “brain-in-a-vat” thought experiments have proposed. If the brain cells we grow develop consciousness, will we be any better than the evil AI overlords in the Matrix, placating living brains trapped in laboratories with virtual reality?

Sakaguchi explains that even though the brain organoids are showing signs of spontaneous activity, they are unlikely to develop consciousness because they lack the ability to be stimulated, unlike living brains attached to a body that senses the world.

“It is very difficult to know they are thinking or feeling,” says Sakaguchi. “But we think cerebral organoids without input and output system will not have consciousness since consciousness require subjective experience.”

Who is responsible for solving stroke?

All these problems in stroke to solve. And then the minor problem of 100% recovery for all.

1.  Well obviously it is not our fucking failures of stroke associations. They can't even do the minimum of a stroke research and protocol database.  They have no strategy at all.

2.  Obviously not our stroke doctors? They never do anything more than the status quo. Even though 90% of their patients don't make it to 100% recovery.  No contact with researchers to solve the reasons why their patients are not recovering. They should all be fired for incompetence.

3.  Not our stroke therapists. They know their therapy interventions barely work but don't send those failures up the chain of command to get resolved and fixed. 

4. Emergency room doctors? Of course not, even though they knew immediately that tPA only worked to completely reverse the stroke 12% of the time, they seemed to have raised no hue and cry about that failure. For 20 years the stroke medical profession has been pushing to expand the timeframe for a failed intervention.  

5. Researchers?
Of course not, they are following their own muse rather than any sort of strategy that will help survivors recover.

6. Neurologists?

Are Neurologists Respected? Read and weep. 

Why doesn't any neurologist have their protocols and statistics posted for all to see?

7. Stroke hospital?
They are here to make money, Who gives a shit about patients?
Every single stroke hospital in the world should be under fire.
1. Using tPA with only 12% efficacy.
2. No fast and objective way to diagnose strokes.
3. Only 10% of stroke patients get to full recovery.
4. Nothing being done in the first week to stop the neuronal cascade of death.

8. Patients?  Yep, it is you. You are responsible for the failures of all these Drs., Ph.Ds and the complete stroke medical world.  

9. Dean? Yes, you are responsible Dean. Get cracking on those solutions. You are that someone else. You are the only one who seems to understand that stroke currently is not treatable but can see a path forward.

Self-efficacy and Reach Performance in Individuals With Mild Motor Impairment Due to Stroke

Cherry picking again. What about helping those with medium to major impairment?  Stop ignoring the real world, the real world exists. Stroke survivors live in the real world, not some idealized world only researchers inhabit.

Self-efficacy and Reach Performance in Individuals With Mild Motor Impairment Due to Stroke

Show all authors

Jill Campbell Stewart, PhD, Rebecca Lewthwaite, PhD, Janelle Rocktashel, MS, ...

First Published March 18, 2019 Research Article

https://doi.org/10.1177/1545968319836231

Article information

Abstract

Background: Persistent deficits in arm function are common after stroke. An improved understanding of the factors that contribute to the performance of skilled arm movements is needed. One such factor may be self-efficacy (SE).  
Objective: To determine the level of SE for skilled, goal-directed reach actions in individuals with mild motor impairment after stroke and whether SE for reach performance correlated with actual reach performance.  
Methods:
A total of 20 individuals with chronic stroke (months poststroke: mean 58.1 ± 38.8) and mild motor impairment (upper-extremity Fugl-Meyer [FM] motor score: mean 53.2, range 39 to 66) and 6 age-matched controls reached to targets presented in 2 directions (ipsilateral, contralateral). Prior to each block (24 reach trials), individuals rated their confidence on reaching to targets accurately and quickly on a scale that ranged from 0 (not very confident) to 10 (very confident).
Results: Overall reach performance was slower and less accurate in the more-affected arm compared with both the less-affected arm and controls. SE for both reach speed and reach accuracy was lower for the more-affected arm compared with the less-affected arm. For reaches with the more-affected arm, SE for reach speed and age significantly predicted movement time to ipsilateral targets (R² = 0.352), whereas SE for reach accuracy and FM motor score significantly predicted end point error to contralateral targets (R² = 0.291).
Conclusions: SE relates to measures of reach control and may serve as a target for interventions to improve proximal arm control after stroke.

Keywords stroke, self-efficacy, confidence, arm, kinematics

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Stroke sufferer wants more rehab for young

That is NOT what you want. You want effective treatment not just access to treatment. Ask for the correct item, otherwise you are playing into the tyranny of low expectations that the stroke medical world wants you to believe in. 100% recovery is going to be extremely hard, challenging and time consuming work for stroke researchers. DEMAND 100% RECOVERY, NOTHING LESS. 

Stroke sufferer wants more rehab for young

David Noblet, who suffered a stroke aged just 26, wants more rehabilitation treatment available on the NHS.

Researchers: Publications and passive dissemination = “Here’s that report you didn’t ask for”.

This statement is a major problem with stroke research, everything is passive.  Nothing from research ever seems to be immediately useful for rehab. With researchers not following any kind of stroke strategy NOTHING useful gets accomplished towards 100% recovery. The research mindset needs to completely change; follow the stroke strategy and create protocols from research. And that change needs to be initiated by the president of that great stroke association. 
But that will never occur until survivors take over the stroke associations and run the research.  
.

We need to do more to disseminate and make impact- Caroline Fiennes #GEIS2018

Will doctors be replaced by algorithms?

Well, in stroke rehabs case, NO, since there are no rehab protocols to load up into a computer or even an objective diagnosis of the damage that needs to be solved. All because of the laziness of the stroke medical world relying on this fucking stupid statement, 'All strokes are different, all stroke recoveries are different'. If you believe that you haven't thought about stroke recovery at all.  The real replacement will be in stroke researchers because the algorithm will specify exactly what needs to be solved next in the stroke strategy. I can't wait for that day to get here.

Will doctors be replaced by algorithms?

Researchers Find Protein That Could Expand Stem Cells Available for Transplants

Maybe our stroke researchers should followup this approach. Well it will never happen, our fucking failures of stroke associations will sit on their asses doing nothing while twiddling their thumbs.

Researchers Find Protein That Could Expand Stem Cells Available for Transplants

A new discovery could lead to the adult stem cells from human umbilical cord blood (hUCB) becoming readily accepted in patients who undergo adult stem cell treatments for conditions like leukemia, blood disorders, immune system disease and other types of cancer but do not have an appropriate bone marrow match.
A team from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have pinpointed a protein called Ythdf2 that impacts multiple targets and pathways involved in hematopoietic stem cell self-renewal.
“Life-saving bone marrow transplants have been the common practice for decades, but this doesn’t work for everybody,” Stowers Institute Investigator Linheng Li, PhD, the study lead, said in a statement.
The protein recognizes a particular type of modification in a group of mRNAs that encodes key transcription factors for hematopoietic stem cell self-renewal and promotes the decay of the mRNAs within cells.
The researchers knocked out the protein’s function in a mouse model or knocked down the Ythdf2 function in hUCB cells to increase the expression of the transcription factors and expand the hematopoietic stems cells—the major type of adult stem cells in hUCB.
The researcher’s observed that impairing Ythdf2 function did not alter the types of cells that were produced or lead to increased blood cell malignancies.
“Our approach of targeting Ythdf2 function using an RNA-based technique also helped avoid more persistent DNA-related changes such as mutations in epigenetic regulators,” Zhenrui Li, PhD, a predoctoral researcher at the University of Kansas Medical Center who is performing thesis research in the Linheng Li Lab and first author of the study, said in a statement.
Because the targeted protein is present in different kinds of stem cells, targeting it and discovering how it affects hematopoietic stem cells could be a safer approach to treat leukemia or cancer.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, about 30 percent of patients have a bone marrow match available in their families, with more than 170,000 people in the U.S. expected to be diagnosed with a blood cancer this year.
Adult stem cells from umbilical cords are more likely to be a match for more people because of lesser compatibility requirements needed than with bone marrow transplants. However, adults need two cords’ worth of blood per treatment.
“This work represents a path forward by demonstrating the ability to reliably expand adult stem cells from umbilical cord blood in the laboratory without terminally differentiating the cells into more mature and relatively short-lived blood cells,” Joseph McGuirk, MD, professor of medicine and medical director of blood and marrow transplant at the University of Kansas Health System, who was not directly involved with the study, said in a statement.
“These findings represent a major advance in the field and have significant potential to improve the outcomes of thousands of children and adults who undergo umbilical cord blood transplantation every year.”
The study was published in Cell Research.

Rigor Mortis: What’s Wrong with Medical Science and How to Fix It

From ScienceBasedMedicine blog.  Our stroke associations should be able to tell us if stroke researchers are just as bad and need to be completely replaced.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/rigor-mortis-whats-wrong-with-medical-science-and-how-to-fix-it/
Medical research has been plagued by less-than-rigorous practices and a culture that rewards quantity over quality. In a new book, Richard Harris identifies the problems, proposes solutions, and offers hope.

Harriet Hall on January 2, 2018 

I just finished reading Richard Harris’ excellent book, Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions. From the title, I was expecting an angry, biased polemic attacking science and scientists. I was very pleasantly surprised. He doesn’t condemn science. He points out problems with the way science is carried out, mostly problems that scientists are already aware of and are trying to correct. And he offers practical solutions. He explains that the term “rigor mortis” in the title is hyperbole. Rigor in scientific research isn’t dead, but it needs a major jolt of energy. He says scientists have been taking shortcuts around the methods they are supposed to use to avoid fooling themselves. They have often had to choose between maintaining scientific rigor and doing what they perceive as necessary to maintain a career in a hypercompetitive field. That’s a choice no one should have to make. The challenge is not just to make technical fixes in research procedures, but to change the culture.
He cites a study published in Nature in 2012 by C. Glenn Begley on raising the standards for preclinical cancer research. Begley identified 53 potentially groundbreaking studies and tried to reproduce them, working closely with the original researchers. He was only able to reproduce the findings of six (6!) of the studies. The non-reproducible studies had been cited as many as 2,000 times by other researchers as a basis for their own studies. Non-reproducible findings had sent research off in wrong directions. Sometimes huge houses of cards are built on an error, and it can take years for the science to self-correct.
Leonard Freedman, who founded the Global Biological Standards Institute, estimates that:

• 20% of studies have untrustworthy designs:
• 25% use dubious ingredients such as contaminated cells or antibodies that are not as selective as they think.
• 8% involve poor lab technique
• 18% of the time, scientist mishandle their data analysis.

Overall, he found that over half of preclinical research was irreproducible and untrustworthy, representing a waste of $28 billion a year.