Aphasia Increases Cost of Care After Ischemic Stroke

In ischemic stroke patients, aphasia is associated with greater morbidity, higher mortality, and increased length of stay, and adds $1,703 per patient to the cost of stroke-related care, according to research published online Feb. 16 in Stroke.
FRIDAY, Feb. 17 (HealthDay News) -- In ischemic stroke patients, aphasia is associated with greater morbidity, higher mortality, and increased length of stay, and adds $1,703 per patient to the cost of stroke-related care, according to research published online Feb. 16 in Stroke.
To quantify the contribution of aphasia to the overall cost of stroke care, Charles Ellis, Ph.D., of the VA Center for Disease Prevention and Health Interventions for Diverse Populations in Charleston, S.C., and colleagues conducted a retrospective study of 3,200 Medicare beneficiaries who experienced ischemic stroke in 2004.
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Schaumburg man doesn’t let his loss of speech crush his spirit

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	Looking to his wife, Mary Beth, to supply the words, Steve Riedner points to photographs and drawings of what he wants to say. The 63-year-old Schaumburg man suffers from Primary Progressive Aphasia, a dementia that initially attacks the part of the brain that processes language and speech.   JOE LEWNARD | Staff Photographer
	Using notebooks, photographs and a whiteboard helps Steve Riedner communicate with his wife, Mary Beth. The 63-year-old Schaumburg man suffers from Primary Progressive Aphasia, a dementia that initially attacks the part of the brain that processes language and speech.   JOE LEWNARD | Staff Photographer
	While a rare brain disorder called Primary Progressive Aphasia is robbing Steve Riedner of the ability to say “I love you,” the Schaumburg man still manages to get that message across to Mary Beth, who has been his wife for nearly 39 years and now is also his caretaker.   JOE LEWNARD | Staff Photographer

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By Burt Constable

The sight of me standing outside his front door in Schaumburg sends Steve Riedner into one of his belly-shaking, blue eyes-a-twinkling chuckles. He points to the jaunty, herringbone tweed newsboy hat on my head, reaches into his closet and pulls out an identical cap.
The very idea that I’d wear the same hat as Steve — a flag-flying, lifetime NRA member and Vietnam veteran who enthusiastically challenges some of my opinions — gets me to giggling, too. Then Steve puts it into words.

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“Tay dot den den tane net not be de da,” a grinning Steve says, his cadence and expression giving me the impression that he might be meaning to say, “You’ve got the same hat as me now, so you can start following my lead on the important issues.”
Or maybe not, says Mary Beth, a better translator of Steve’s intent based on her almost 39 years of being married to the man.
When we last got together in 2007, Steve had just been diagnosed with Primary Progressive Aphasia, a rare, incurable form of dementia that strikes people as young as in their 40s and destroys the brain’s ability to communicate. Five years ago, he tol....................
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Can grapefruit stop stroke?

Grapefruit and oranges “appear to protect against having a ‘brain attack’”, the Daily Mail has reported. The Mail says that these and other citrus fruits can protect the brain from stroke due to their antioxidant content.
The research behind this story involved almost 70,000 women taking part in the Nurses’ Health Study in the US. They were asked to complete food frequency questionnaires (which asked them to recall how frequently certain foods were consumed during a specified period of time) every four years and over around 14 years of follow-up the researchers documented the numbers of strokes that occurred, overall and by type.
The researchers found that women who had the highest intak..........
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Will Drinking Diet Soda Increase Your Risk For A Heart Attack?

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According to the Daily Mail, the New York Times’ “rival” as the most-read English language newspaper in the world, “research” has revealed that“drinking just a single can of diet fizzy drink every day can increase the risk of a heart attack or stroke.”
It should be noted that “research” has also revealed the risk of the Daily Mail misreporting a study’s findings, especially when there’s an opportunity to write an alarming headline. As Dorothy Bishop, a Professor of Neurodevelopmental Psychology at Oxford University, noted in giving the paper her “Orwellian Award for Journalistic Misrepresentation” the Mail sets the standards for inaccurate reporting of academic research....
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Medical mysteries: Was crying caused by man’s severe depression?

Helayne Seidman/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST - Richard Anderson and his wife Rose in their Staten Island home. Richard suffered a severe traumatic brain injury at 47 which developed into uncontrollable crying. A new drug has helped treat his disorder called pseudobulbar affect

By Sandra G. Boodman, Published: February 20

Of all the adjustments forced on Rose Anderson and her family, among the hardest was dealing with the crying jags.
Around 9 p.m. on Aug. 4, 2004, while Anderson and her family were crossing the street from a New Jersey beach boardwalk to their hotel, a drunk driver barreled into her husband, Richard. He was flung 26 feet before slamming headfirst onto the pavement.

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A 47-year-old manager for the New York City government, Richard underwent emergency brain surgery and spent three weeks in a coma, followed by nearly two months in the hospital. He suffered a severe traumatic brain injury that left him with permanent cognitive and speech problems and robbed him of his sense of smell and taste.
“They were preparing me for a lifetime of therapies,” recalled Rose of the weeks her husband spent at Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in East Orange, N.J.
But no one prepared the Andersons for Richard’s unpredictable and uncontrollable weeping, which began weeks after the accident and seemed to worsen with time.
“He would cry with almost anyone,” his wife recalled. Thoughts of his dogs, his family or even happy occasions could trigger tears. His teenage daughters found the incidents, which occurred several times a week, almost unbearable.
“As things got better, this shined brighter,” said Richard Anderson, who describes himself as a “very chauvinistic kind of guy” who was mortified by his inability to control his emotions. “It was very upsetting to me to have tears just rolling down my fac....
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Transformed Patient Unveils ‘New Self’ to Inspire Guests at Heart & Stroke Seminar

Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women over the age of 25, in the United States, regardless of race or ethnicity. More than 8 million women are affected by this disease – a statistic that Long Beach Memorial doesn’t take lightly. The Center for Women’s Cardiac Health and Research at Long Beach Memorial focuses on prevention of heart disease, exclusively in women, offering cardiovascular screenings and individualized care plans.

Read more http://www.everythinglongbeach.com/transformed-patient-at-heart-stroke-seminar/

Pet Therapy: How Animals And Humans Heal Each Other

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March 5, 2012

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Maggie Starbard/NPR Ryan Shank-Rowe, 9, takes part in a therapeutic riding program at Little Full Cry Farm in Clifton, Va., last month.

Those of us who own pets know they make us happy. But a growing body of scientific research is showing that our pets can also make us healthy, or healthier.
That helps explain the increasing use of animals — dogs and cats mostly, but also birds, fish and even horses — in settings ranging from hospitals and nursing homes to schools, jails and mental institutions.
  Take Viola, or Vi for short. The retired guide dog is the resident canine at the Children's Inn on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. The inn is where families stay when their children are undergoing experimental therapies at NIH.
Vi, a chunky yellow Labrador retriever with a perpetually wagging tail, greets families as they come downstairs in the morning and as they return from treatment in the afternoon. She can even be "checked out" for a walk around the bucolic NIH grounds.

Melissa Forsyth/NPR Thelma Balmaceda, age, 4, pets Viola, the resident canine at the Children's Inn on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Families stay at the inn when their children are undergoing experimental therapies at NIH.

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Aspirin lowers stroke risk from trans fat’ in older women

Washington: Older women whose diets include a substantial amount of trans fats are more likely than their counterparts to suffer an ischemic stroke, a new study has shown.

However, according to the findings from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers, the risk of stroke associated with trans fat intake was lower among women taking aspirin.


The study of 87,025 generally healthy postmenopausal women aged 50 to 79 found that those whose diets contained the largest amounts of trans fats were 39 percent more likely to have an ischemic stroke than women who ate the least amount of trans fat......
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Physicians Order Costly, Redundant Neuroimaging for Stroke Patients

ANN ARBOR, Mich., March 5, 2012 — U-M researchers found that most patients underwent both MRIs and CTs; neuroimaging biggest source of escalating stroke care costs
ANN ARBOR, Mich., March 5, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Neuroimaging for stroke patients may be unnecessarily costly and redundant, contributing to rising costs nationwide for stroke care, according to University of Michigan research.
The research, published in the Annals of Neurology, found that 95 percent of stroke patients who received magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) also had a computed tomography (CT) scan.
"Compared to CT, MRI is a more accurate test for stroke," says James F. Burke, M.D., lead author of the study and a clinical lecturer in the University of Michigan Medical School's Department of Neurology. "But our results showed that MRI is not replacing CT as the primary stroke neuroimaging study — instead, patients are getting bo

Read more here: http://www.bradenton.com/2012/03/05/3918899/physicians-order-costly-redundant.html#storylink=cpy

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Drug Might Limit Stroke Brain Damage

An experimental drug could help protect against brain damage during a stroke, reducing the risk of permanent disability.

An experimental drug could protect stroke victims from brain damage. The treatment has shown very promising results in animal tests, and early results with humans are also encouraging.

There is currently only one effective treatment for stroke. Tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) can dissolve the blood clots that cause a stroke.
But it has to be given very soon after symptoms appear, and doctors first have to make sure that the stroke was not caused by a ruptured blood vessel, in which case tPA can make the situation a lot worse...
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