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The latest news from across neurorehabilitation.
Opinion18 SepBy Rae Hughes, clinical psychologist and Pete Fleming, clinical tutor and consultant clinical neuropsychologist.
Adjusting to life after a brain injury involves coming to terms with, and adapting to, changes, which often span multiple areas of a person’s life, such as hobbies, employment, and interpersonal relationships. Understandably for many individuals, their life following a brain injury can look completely different to before.
News17 SepThe Covid-19 pandemic has caused growing concern around the associated neurological risks, including stroke. Researchers set out to understand the short-term risk of stroke among patients hospitalised with the virus.
Ramin Zand and Vida Abedi, researchers from the Geisinger Health System and authors of the paper, told NR Times: “Since the emergence of the pandemic, several cases of cerebrovascular events were reported among patients with SARS-CoV-2 and highlighted in the news. However, these observations were based on small studies or limited observations and a large multinational study was needed to have a clear answer.”
News17 SepOne community charity has been running improvisation classes for its members online since the start of the pandemic. Editor Jessica Brown drops in on a class to meet the members thinking on the spot.
I opened the Zoom call to 11 faces looking at me, waiting eagerly for the session to begin. But first, some ground rules. Keep the session positive, remember you can pass if you want to, and say the most obvious thing that comes to mind so you keep the momentum going. Now, the improv class, Let’s Make A Scene, could begin. The classes are led by Craig Werth, facilitator at the Krempels Center, a nonprofit community organisation that provides quality programs and services to people living with brain injury in New Hampshire, US.
News17 SepIt's widely agreed that the sooner a stroke patient receives help, the better their chances of survival, and the better their recovery. Graham McClelland has seen how strokes impact people in the most acute sense of the word. As a paramedic for the North East ambulance service, he dealt with stroke patients on the frontline. Now, he's trying to understand and improve the care people first receive when they’ve had a stroke.
Community neuro rehab17 SepAfter experiencing an acute stroke, patients come to the 20-bed Oxfordshire Stroke Rehabilitation Unit at Abingdon Community Hospital as part of their care pathway. They normally stay at the service, run by Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, for around four weeks before they’re discharged home or to other locations in the community.
Follow-up rehab is usually provided by the county’s community therapy service, but with the Covid-19 pandemic in March came a national focus on patients being discharged from hospital, and rehab services were put on the backburner.
News15 SepResearchers have identified the specific type of immune cell that causes brain inflammation in herpes simplex virus (HSV) encephalitis, a condition widely known as the cold sore virus, which causes inflammation and swelling of the brain.
They have also determined the protein that calls this immune cell into the brain from the bloodstream, causing brain infection, which is the most common cause of viral encephalitis. The findings, published in Cell Reports, explain that HSV kills a lot of patients. Those who survive are often left with brain injury due to the inflammation and damage caused by the virus and immune cells gaining access to the brain, breaking down the blood-brain barrier.
Preventing brain injury14 SepBlood pressure monitors should be handed out on prescription to slash the number of people who die or are left with disabilities from strokes and heart attacks, a medical charity has said.
Making the home monitors available to anyone diagnosed with high blood pressure would allow people to control the condition more effectively and reduce the demand on GPs’ surgeries, Blood Pressure UK said. “It would make a huge difference,” said Prof Graham MacGregor, chair of the charity. “High blood pressure is the biggest killer in the world from the strokes and heart attacks it causes, and we know that if you are found to have raised blood pressure and it’s treated with tablets and lifestyle changes, it hugely reduces your risk.”
News11 SepThere are still many steps to be made by government to help drive improvements within stroke care, according to Chris Bryant, MP for Rhondda and chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Acquired Brain Injury.
The creation of major trauma units across the UK, says Bryant, have saved, but not necessarily improved, the lives of people with brain injuries. “We’ve been able to save many more lives from traumatic brain injury (TBI) through road traffic accidents, but the problem is, all too often, we save people’s lives but we’re not giving them quality of life,” he says. “A quarter of these units don’t have any consultant in neuro rehabilitation. Quite often there’s not enough neuro rehabilitation available for people to be able to have consistent and prolonged support.”
News11 SepEvery year in the UK, five in every 100,000 children, and 3,200 people aged 35 to 64, have a stroke. Younger people are more likely to have subarachnoid haemorrhage strokes, which are associated with worse clinical outcomes.
Austin Willett, chief executive of charity Different Strokes, which was set up to support younger stroke survivors, says support for younger stroke survivors is lacking. “A lot of these people think no one their age before has experienced this, so they might not know who they can go to get support,” he said in a UK Stroke Assembly 2020 online conference this week on the topic of young stroke survivors.
News10 SepIn 1974, leading neuroscientist Graham Teasdale co-created the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) while at the Institute of Neurological Sciences in Glasgow. This scale has since been used to assess coma and impaired consciousness in patients who have had a brain injury.
The scale is used to describe variations in a patient's eye, motor, and verbal responses. Each feature is assigned numerical scores depending on the quality of the response, and total scores range from three, which is a deep coma, to 15, which is full consciousness.
