Being one of the most devastating and common age-related health issues, strokes are frightening because of their ability to strike with little warning to cause severe disability or even death. While blockages in blood flow or ruptures in the blood vessels themselves can cause strokes, the end result in both cases is death of brain cells.
For those patients who survive a stroke, the damage to their brains will often affect daily living.
Damage from a stroke can cause loss of mobility, vision issues and even personality changes. Some 40 to 60% of patients will lose the ability to control their own bladder. As well, 80 to 90% of those who suffer a stroke will experience some level of muscle weakness. As many as 1 in 4 stroke victims will lose some ability to speak. It goes without saying that issues like these significantly affect the life of a stroke victim.
In the US alone, some 800,000 people experience a stroke annually and overall, strokes are one of the most common causes of disability in industrialized nations. In Australia, the UK and Canada, some 60,000, 150,000 and 50,000 people respectively will suffer a stroke each year. More than 75% of strokes occur in people over the age of 65.
While medical science is involved in research to prevent strokes, to limit the damage to the brain when they do occur and is also trying to find ways to
repair the brain after a stroke, the reality is that most stroke victims will be left to recover on their own. For the more fortunate, rehabilitation is an important treatment that can greatly improve the life of the stroke victim.
Because of the sheer number of people affected by strokes, various research efforts are attempting to determine effective ways of restoring basic abilities to those who suffer a stroke. Apart from medical treatments, the efforts are focused on retraining and rehabilitating the brain to work around the damaged brain areas.
One of the disabilities caused by stroke that is most easily recognized, loss of muscle strength and muscle control is also one that is seeing significant benefit from research.
Researchers at the Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center have found that physiotherapy with robotic or human assistance can substantially improve a patient's control of a paralyzed arm. With 9 months of therapy involving 3 single hour sessions per week, patients with even multiple strokes were much more able to perform many simple day to day tasks. Further more, those patients who regained more hand and arm control also tended to become more active in general.
Similar research at the University of Genoa has also shown positive results. There, researchers used the robotic assistant to ensure that patients performing movement exercises with a partially paralyzed arm were performing the movements in a natural way. As a physiotherapy assistant that never becomes tired, such movement-assisting robots can be invaluable.
Besides improving arm function, other aspects of improving mobility are as simple as the use of ankle splints. In reviews of 14 previous studies, researchers at the University of Salford found that ankle splints could often compensate for weakened lower leg strength and some balance issues to allow a stroke victim to become active more easily.
Also regarding balance, research from the University of Illinois found that the slow moving martial art of Tai Chi enabled stroke victims to regain balance control. The researchers observed that after only 6 weeks of Tai Chi in 3 one-hour sessions per week, stroke victims were much more able to retain their balance. The restoration of balance is important because falling is always a serious risk for those who have had a stroke.
Once thought to be a cause of permanent disability, strokes are now seen as a condition from which some recovery is often possible. Rehabilitation can retrain the brain to partially compensate for lost abilities.
As well, in research conducted by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, researchers observed that useful levels of muscle control could be regained even years after a stroke. This finding is important because it indicates that stroke victims can often regain some quality of life even if they did little immediately following the stroke.
This also means that with the right assistance, some of the 6 million stroke victims in the US could regain some movement thought lost forever. While this news is by no means something to cause dancing in the streets, changing a prognosis from one of no recovery to limited recovery is significant for those who have suffered a stroke.
Related Linkshttp://www.dorislessingsociety.org/article/Managing-Incontinence-After-A-Stroke---May-Is-Stroke-Awareness-Month.html
http://www.strokefoundation.com.au/facts-figures-and-stats-10-things-you-should-know-about-stroke
http://www.heartandstroke.com/site/c.ikIQLcMWJtE/b.3483991/k.34A8/Statistics.htm#stroke
http://www.stroke.org.uk/media_centre/facts_and_figures/index.html
http://www.physorg.com/news186413813.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19592791
http://www.cfah.org/hbns/archives/getDocument.cfm?documentID=1839
http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/medicine_health/stroke_survivors_improve_balance_tai_chi_129899.html
http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2010/04/stroke
