Strokes among those younger than 55 are a growing phenomenon

Reading the first paragraph is precisely why we need an objective diagnosis of stroke. Like maybe one of these eleven. This is stupid that something so severe has no objective way to identify it.  We will just get the F.A.S.T. do-nothingness and kick the can down the road again from our stroke associations.  
But hell nothing will get done with the current stroke leadership out there.
http://www.philly.com/philly/health/20121231_Understanding_Stroke.html

Brent Wylie was arguing with the doctors in the emergency room at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. They said he had just had a stroke; he insisted that he had had a few beers and was probably drunk. That's why he had fallen on the sidewalk and was slurring his words.
"I had just graduated from college two months earlier, and I was totally healthy," Wylie, then 23, said. "Strokes didn't happen to people like me."

Simple, everyday activities can strengthen balance

I'm sure your doctor and therapist have informed you of this already. If not ask them for permission to improve your balance. Yeah for Australia.
http://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/simple-everyday-activities-can-strengthen-balance
If you love tennis, golf, running, dancing, or any number of other sports or activities, working on balance buffs your abilities. Not an athlete? Just walking across the room or down the block requires good balance. So does rising from a chair, going up and down stairs, toting packages, and even turning to look behind you.
And good balance helps prevent potentially disabling falls.
There is a lot you can do to preserve and improve your balance, and it doesn’t take special fitness classes or exercises. Incorporating balance and strength activities into your daily routine could be enough to lower your risk of falling.
Researchers in Australia tested a program called Lifestyle Integrated Functional Exercise (LiFE) on a group of 317 people, ages 70 and older, who had fallen in the previous year. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: the LiFE program, a structured exercise and strengthening program, or a control “sham” program of gentle exercises.
Those in the LiFE program incorporated balance and strength movements throughout their day — for example, squatting instead of bending over to close a drawer, or walking sideways while carrying groceries from the car to the house. At the end of one year, the LiFE group had experienced 31% fewer falls than the two other groups – a total of 172 falls, compared with 193 in the structured exercise group and 224 in the control group. People were also more likely to stick with the LiFE program than with the other two programs. To incorporate balance exercises into your daily routine, try standing on one leg while talking on the phone or sitting down in a chair without using your hands.
For more on ways to improve your balance, buy Better Balance from Harvard Medical School.

Kickstart - New technology to help stroke survivors walk

Something for you to discuss with your therapist. I know going to your doctor with your ideas on how to get better goes against the whole medical establishment. And mine dismissed my ideas/questions. But hell, stroke rehab is a complete failure, we can't do any worse. I know this showed up in Stroke Survivors Tattler this weekend  but it needs all the exposure it can get. Originally inspired by a horses leg; Technology was licensed to Cadence Biomedical

Device inspired by a horse’s leg aims to help people with weak hips walk confidently

http://www.cadencebiomedical.com/showcase/ericm/
The Kickstart orthosis is a new class of self-powered exoskeletons designed to enable walking and accelerate rehabilitation for those recovering from neurological injuries such as stroke, spinal cord injury, and traumatic brain injury, as well as degenerative diseases such as MS, muscular dystrophy, and ALS.  It’s designed to help users regain and maintain independence with less reliance on walkers, canes, and wheelchairs and without the expense of robotic devices.

cross-country skiing stroke rehab

We have about 3 inches of snow here. Walked across the parking lot to the woods with my skis and one pole. Its about 30 F here, so quite warm, no need for long underwear. The ground isn't frozen yet so I had good traction with my pole. I'm using my waxless skis because  they are slower and better able to take skiing over branches, rocks and dirt. My waxable wood skis are beautiful but it may be years before I can handle the speed of them.  I went without the AFO because it cramps my toes a lot. It was a problem because my ankle rolled a lot, forcing me to ski very slowly and awkwardly trying to keep the weight on my inside. I cut short the loop, maybe one third mile.  While I very seldom roll my ankle when walking the action of skiing is completely different since you are trying to push the ski forward with a flat foot.  And the spasticity of my ankle  tries to point the toe downward and to the underside.  This is so common there should be a stroke protocol to overcome this and be readily available to every survivor.  Only 30 minutes skiing. On New Years I'll try again probably with the AFO.
This used to be my one of my main cardiovascular exercises and I would do it for hours.  That will be years ahead. But I won't give up.

A Large-Scale Model of the Functioning Brain

Ask your doctor to relate this to your damage and what needs to be done to correct that damage. Don't back down even when the stupid and lazy comment comes out,' All strokes are different, all stroke recoveries are different'. If that comment is used challenge them to prove it via published research. Damn it, unless we get our doctors to give us scientific proof of their opinions we'll never get anywhere.
Great pictures in here.
http://www.scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Eliasmith-et-al.-2012.pdf

Blink if your brain needs a rest

This should immediately raise the question to stroke researchers. Survivors are incredibly fatigued. Should we be blinking more often to alleviate that? Ask your doctor and watch them squirm until they fall off their chair.

Blink if your brain needs a rest

Why do we spend roughly 10 percent of our waking hours with our eyes closed - blinking far more often than is actually necessary to keep our eyeballs lubricated? Scientists have pried open the answer to this mystery, finding that the human brain uses that tiny moment of shut-eye to power down.
The mental break can last anywhere from a split second to a few seconds before attention is fully restored, researchers from Japan's Osaka University found. During that time, scans that track the ebb and flow of blood within the brain revealed that regions associated with paying close attention momentarily go offline. And in the brief break in attention, brain regions collectively identified as the "Default Mode Network" power up.

This probably matches up with

Tired neurons caught nodding off in sleep-deprived rats

The rest at the link.

Molly Crockett: Beware neuro-bunk, neuro-bollocks, neuro-flapdoodle

A great TED talk. Beware any claims that purport to help your brain.
If someone tries to sell you something with a brain on it … ask to see the evidence. Ask for the part of the story that's not being told.” (Molly Crockett)
An 11 minute video worth watching, especially if you want to  believe the neuro headlines in newspaper and magazine articles.


Brains are ubiquitous in modern marketing: Headlines proclaim cheese sandwiches help with decision-making, while a “neuro” drink claims to reduce stress. There’s just one problem, says neuroscientist Molly Crockett: The benefits of these "neuro-enhancements" are not proven scientifically. In this to-the-point talk, Crockett explains the limits of interpreting neuroscientific data, and why we should all be aware of them.
http://www.ted.com/talks/molly_crockett_beware_neuro_bunk.html

Englishman wakes up after stroke speaking Welsh

I'm more curious if he understands spoken Welsh and what about his writing and reading comprehension? So many questions and there is no one to follow up. Put him in a fMRI scanner and see where his brain lights up when communicating in Welsh.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Welsh

American Heart Association announces 2012 top 10 advances in Heart Disease and Stroke Research

You will notice by reading these that not a single breakthrough was found for stopping the neuronal cascade of death. Of course we can't even find out if any research trials were attempted for this. Failure, failure, failure.
If survivors were running this we would be a lot more open, highlighting the failures and where the research was going.
http://www.clarksvilleonline.com/2012/12/19/american-heart-association-announces-2012-top-10-advances-in-heart-disease-and-stroke-research/

From apoplexy to stroke

If you want to know historical info about stroke/apoplexy.
PANDORA POUND, MICHAEL BURY1, SHAH EBRAHIM
Department of Primary Care and Population Sciences, Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, Rowland Hill Street
London NW3 2PF, UK
'Department of Social Policy and Social Science, Royal Holloway College, Egham Hill, Egham, Surrey TW20 OEX, UK
Address correspondence to: R Pound. Department of Public Health Medicine, Block 8 (South Wing), St Thomas'
Hospital, Lambeth Palace Road, London SEI 7EH. Fax: (+44) 171 928 1468. Email: p.pound@umds.ac.uk 

From apoplexy to stroke

Selected lines below;
and bloodletting, vomits, purges and enemas remained
popular responses to apoplexy until the beginning of
the twentieth century.
 -------------------------------------------------------------
Wepfer (1620-95) also believed that apoplexy was caused by
an obstruction in the path to the brain, with the result
that the brain did not receive enough "animal spirits".
 ---------------------------------------------------------------
Copland [21] provides an example of the latter, relating the
warning that Napoleon was given by his physician,
Corvisart, with regards to apoplexy: "a first attack,
which is often slight, is a summons without costs; a
second, a summons with costs; but a third is an
execution on the person".
----------------------------------------------------------------
"Those Persons, above all others, are in danger of
sudden deaths, that are of an unwieldy, corpulent
Body; that have short Necks, strait Chests, and are
subject to hitch in their Breathing; great, large heads,
with a very sanguine or pale Countenance, if they
indulge in a luxurious Manner of Living, seldom
escape a sudden, fatal stroke" [14].
-----------------------------------------------------------
as Tanner suggested in 1854:
"Where a predisposition to apoplexy is suspected,
the individual should avoid strong bodily exertion;
venereal excitement; the excitement of drunkenness;
violent mental emotion; straining at stool; long
stooping; tight neckcloths; too much indulgence in
sleep; and warm baths" [18].
---------------------------------------------------------------

Of course the latest is that stroke is the wrong term to use, because it doesn't say anything specific.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The terminology has seduced us into believing the problem is simple. The term ‘stroke’ should be exorcised from the medical literature. A stroke is defined as an acute neurological event caused either by cerebral infarction or intracerebral haemorrhage in which symptoms persist for longer than 24 hours or which results in death. The WHO has included subarachnoid haemorrhage as a form of stroke,14 15 but many authors do not. From a neuroscientific point of view, the term ‘stroke’ is unsatisfactory in that it includes a number of pathologies whose management and prognosis are different. By using the term there is thus a danger of over simplifying a complex area. Adding qualifiers helps little. Haemorrhagic stroke, which means primary intraparenchymal haemorrhage, is often confused with secondary haemorrhagic transformation of an infarct. The term ischaemic stroke is equivalent to cerebral infarction, but fails to convey the heterogenous nature of the pathology.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The term ‘stroke’ is obscurantist, reductionist, and redundant. It has connotations that are unhelpful to both the general public and the medical profession. Better terms exist that either do not pretend to be a diagnosis (eg, ‘brain attack’), or that have some pathophysiological significance. ‘Stroke’ should be consigned to the dustbin of medical usage.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Great picture at the end of the 8 pages - Help the Aged; let them sleep
We have improved greatly since then, we don't damage them with noxious treatments but we still have no useful acute or chronic treatments

2012 review

It was a good year, started out umemployed. After innumerable applications and 3 different writeups of my resume. Got hired in May for a start date, June 20. It did require me to move to East Lansing, MI by myself, now I'm in an apartment. Met quite a few great people through groups in www.meetup.com. Been to numerous dinners and potlucks.    Found out I'm not as much as an introvert as I thought. Get me talking and I can bend anyones ear off. 
Not too much in the way of stroke rehab accomplishments.  My apartment has numerous therapy items laying around, reminding me constantly I should be using them. Bosu ball, trampoline, baseball bat, cane, dumbbell, laundry jug, splitting wedge, hand mirror, estim machine, Saeboflex. I did get a bit of biking in and figured out what to do next year.
Having fun again, life is good.

Medical Documentery 200 years of Medicine - We need one for stroke

We could start with the Cullens classification system of stroke 1769 
and move to the nostroms of the late 1800s
and then  Signe Brunnstrom 
and Berta Bobabath of the 1950s. 
Ending with the last major advance of tPA in 1996.

 We have to have something like this if we ever expect to get past the tipping point for stroke.

We'll wait forever if we expect our stroke associations to do anything.
 
http://thehandiestone.typepad.com/blog/2012/05/-medical-documentery-200-years-of-medicine.html

Stroke of genius or a fake screen test?

Be careful out there.
http://www.wauchopegazette.com.au/story/1209409/stroke-of-genius-or-a-fake-screen-test/?cs=27
The first six paragraphs.
MEDICAL regulators have warned the public to be wary of a new private stroke-screening service, saying they could be wasting their money as there is little evidence the tests can reduce risk of the condition.
International preventive health company Screen for Life has recently started operating in Australia and is mailing over-50s, urging them to make an appointment for a $199 stroke screen.
The test involves an ultrasound of the neck to check for hardening of the carotid arteries - blood vessels that supply blood to the brain - which can cause stroke.
''As you age, fatty deposits known as plaque can build up in your arteries. You may not notice any symptoms but the silent danger is there,'' the Screen for Life letter reads.
Health experts say this could lead to unnecessary invasive procedures, as many people have some degree of hardening of the arteries but are not at risk of stroke.
The National Stroke Foundation has distanced itself from the group, posting a warning on its website saying that it does not endorse Screen for Life's services nor does it support medical tests that may be unnecessary.

The Measured Man as related to stroke

There are two parts here that we should be interested in, the scientific basis of medicine and the connected computers of  research.
The Measured Man as related to stroke

If we don't have something similar for stroke we are failing our human race. And we aren't going to get there with the current crop of stroke leaders.

Your particular body, mind you, not just some generalized atlas of the human frame, but a working model of your unique corpus, grounded in your own genome, and—using data collected by nanosensors and transmitted by smartphone—refreshed continually with measurements from your body’s insides. This information stream will be collated with similar readings from millions of other similarly monitored bodies all over the planet. Mining this enormous database, software will produce detailed guidance about diet, supplements, exercise, medication, or treatment—guidance based not on the current practice of lumping symptoms together into broad categories of disorders, but on a precise reading of your own body’s peculiarities and its status in real time.
“And at that point,” says Larry, in a typically bold pronouncement that would startle generations of white-coated researchers, “you now have, for the first time in history, a scientific basis for medicine.”

When one of the first Cray computers outside of secret nuclear programs was set up in Munich, Larry started spending his summers there. “And in about ’82, we were at a beer garden and it was probably my second glass of beer, and I was being hosted by a German astrophysicist, world-class,” Larry recalls. “He asks, ‘Tell me something. My father helped build the trains Germany relied on during the war. And here in our occupied country, you guys, you Americans, come over here and mooch off of our supercomputers because you don’t have the wit to put them in your universities where people can get access to them. Have I got that right?’ And I said, ‘Pretty much.’ And he asks, ‘How did you guys win the war?’”  

  This is a stroke war and we don't have the correct generals. Like Lincoln we have to keep firing them until the right one appears.

Larry brought that question home with him to his perch at the University of Illinois. There, in 1983, he helped draft “The Black Proposal,” an unusually concise recommendation (in a black cover) for a $55 million National Science Foundation supercomputer center. When it was funded, along with four other NSF centers, Larry and others argued for using the protocols of the military’s ARPANET (the precursor to the Internet) to link the centers, so that civilian researchers across the nation could use the fastest computers in America for basic research. The linking proposal was controversial not only because it took on the cult of secrecy surrounding the most-advanced computers in America, but because it specifically recommended that the NSF include only computer networks using TCP/IP, a universal computer protocol designed to facilitate not secrecy, but collaboration. TCP/IP allowed different kinds of computers to exchange data seamlessly. At the time, the large computer companies—DEC, IBM, General Electric, etc.—preferred a market model where manufacturers competed to create large fiefdoms, networks that used only their own machines. By adopting Larry’s proposal, the NSF enabled computer networks to plug into the system, a critical step toward today’s Internet.  

If we had a visionary stroke association it would create a proposal to index and link all the stroke research. We could then build off all the failures, including the 1000 hyperacute failures that Dr. Michael Tymianski refers to. 

ASA - Dr. Sacco, 

NSA - Mr. Baranski, 

WSO - Dr. Stephen Davis

Are you visionaries or status quo plodders? 

Novel Drug May Protect Organs in Acute HF

My take on this. If it is relaxing blood vessels then maybe something like this needs to be researched if the reason it relaxes blood vessels is that pericytes let go. If so then it could be used in hyperacute therapy to open the capillaries that have been closed down by clamping pericytes.  Have your researcher get back to you with the answer.
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Cardiology/CHF/36635
The mortality reduction seen in acute heart failure with the novel blood vessel relaxer serelaxin may be a real effect from reduced end-organ damage and faster decongestion, exploratory analysis of the RELAX-AHF trial data suggested.
Safety results from that trial indicated a 37% reduction at 6 months in both cardiovascular death risk and in all-cause mortality with numbers needed to treat of less than 30.
The effect was virtually identical in combined analysis of the phase II and phase III studies with the drug (hazard ratio 0.62 for all-cause death, P=0.0076), Marco Metra, MD, of the University of Brescia, Italy, and colleagues reported online in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Serelaxin treatment was associated with reduced markers of cardiac, renal, and liver damage and with less congestion at day two of the heart failure admission, which all correlated with 6-month mortality "providing a potential mechanism for the improved survival of serelaxin-treated patients."

The rest at the link

This Tiny Gizmo Could Be A Very Big Deal In 2013 - useful for hand rehab And Beyond

Watch this video, your hand therapist should  be able come up with multiple stroke protocols using this.
http://readwrite.com/2012/12/24/is-this-the-hottest-tech-company-of-2013

Survivor's life became a relearning process [The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Wash.]

An article on a PT having stroke
http://www.equities.com/news/headline-story?dt=2012-11-13&val=705194&cat=hcare

On her returning to work.
http://www.phys-therapy.com/SusanGray.html

I couldn't find if she is a blogger.

Your supporter record of the NSA

A recent email from the NSA. I have no intention of supporting them until they become a survivor focused organization. Well Mr. Baranski you know how to contact me and we can discuss your organization failings.

Supporter Number	Supporter Name	Supporter Since	Online Contribution Status
1440161	reinke, dean	Jan 17, 2008	PENDING

Dear dean,

I've been looking over our supporter records and I noticed that you haven't yet made an online contribution to National Stroke Association in 2012. There are just a few days left to support our work before Monday's midnight tax deduction deadline.

As an important part of our community, we're counting on your support to have the resources we need to continue working to reduce the incidence and impact of stroke. 

We depend on your contributions to help us reach the more than 7 million stroke survivors across the U.S. and to support their caregivers and families. You can help us provide additional, critical resources like our Careliving℠ Communityand our newly redesigned StrokeSmart™ magazine.

With just 4 days left until the New Year, we need you to make a contribution of $25 or more to National Stroke Association in 2012. We're shooting to raise $50,000 before the deadline and you're critical to our success.

Click here to rush in your online contribution of $25 or more before we close the books on 2012.

Every day, all of us at National Stroke Association are inspired by the generosity present in the stroke community. Thank you for standing with us.

I know we can count on you to be there again before 2012 is history.

Sincerely,

Jim Baranski
Chief Executive Officer
National Stroke Association

P.S. If you've already given offline in 2012, I thank you for your support. Meeting this goal is crucial to our plans for 2012—if you are able to support our efforts once again, please click here.

Disrupted functional brain networks in autistic toddlers

So our doctors should be able to use  the same EEG recordings to see where our brain networks are disrupted. And then use that to develop a stroke protocol. I can hope can't I?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23259692?dopt=Abstract

Abstract

Communication and integration of information between brain regions plays a key role in healthy brain function. Conversely, disruption in brain communication may lead to cognitive and behavioral problems. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is characterized by impaired social interactions and aberrant basic information processing. Aberrant brain connectivity patterns have indeed been hypothesized to be a key neural underpinning of autism. In this study, graph analytical tools are used to explore the possible deviant functional brain network organization in autism at a very early stage of brain development. Electroencephalography (EEG) recordings in 12 toddlers with autism (mean age 3.5 years) and 19 control subjects were used to assess interregional functional brain connectivity, with functional brain networks constructed at the level of temporal synchronization between brain regions underlying the EEG electrodes. Children with autism showed significantly increased normalized path length and reduced normalized clustering, suggesting a reduced global communication capacity already during early brain development. In addition, whole brain connectivity was found to be significantly reduced in these young patients suggesting an overall under-connectivity of functional brain networks in autism. Our findings support the hypothesis of abnormal neural communication in autism, with deviating effects already present at the early stages of brain development.

Hidden Inflammation Can Trigger Depression

 Ask your doctor if this inflammation process is caused by your stroke.

Hidden Inflammation Can Trigger Depression

A bloggers take on

Depression and Brain White Matter Hyperintensities