Using blood thinners to prevent stroke in very elderly patients with atrial fibrillation is a challenge for doctors, because of an increased risk of bleeding.

Researchers from the Saiseikai Kumamoto Hospital in Japan decided to conduct a randomised, double-blind trial to compare a daily dose of blood thinner edoxaban with a placebo treatment involving almost 700 elderly Japanese patients who were 80 years old and above. They all had atrial fibrillation, and weren’t considered to be appropriate candidates for oral blood-thinning therapy at doses approved for stroke prevention.

After a stroke, up to one in three survivors will experience a condition called spatial neglect – but researchers say there isn’t enough research being done into the condition.

Spatial neglect is a type of vision loss, where a stroke survivor loses awareness of one side. It’s most common after strokes to the right hemisphere, where people will be unaware of objects or people on the right side, says Helen Morse, PhD student University of East Anglia, funded by the Stroke Association. People with spatial neglect don’t have anything physically wrong with their eyes that causes these problems. Morse calls it a ‘complex and bizarre condition’ that can also affect other ways people receive information, such as visually, as well as their hearing and sense of touch. This, she says, makes it a difficult condition to measure, detect and treat.

Ritalin may be the best course of treatment for depression caused by a traumatic brain injury, researchers have found.

Depression is the most common consequence of a TBI, according new research published in the journal Brain Injury. Up to one third of people have been found to have depression in the first year of having their injury, rising to 61 per cent in the subsequent seven years. Depression has been found to impact recovery after a brain injury, and increase the risk of suicide, the paper states. There are three main types of treatment for TBI-related depression: medicine, psychological interventions, and brain stimulation, otherwise known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).