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Christina Hwang, Contributing Reporter | July 18, 2016
“Functional MRI hasn’t been used in the clinic because, before this study, there wasn’t convincing evidence that these patterns of connectivity provide valuable information related to behavior,” said Corbetta.
“We’ll need to conduct additional studies of many more patients to show that getting functional scans in the first hours or days after a stroke could provide valuable information for predicting outcome and tracking recovery.”
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In the second study, led by Lenny Ramsey, a graduate student, the team evaluated what happens to the damaged brain networks during a patient’s stroke recovery in order to answer the question, “Do old pathways re-open, or are new pathways forged?”
The research focused on neglect, a kind of attention deficit that affects about 25 percent of all stroke patients, where patients may not notice something that is in front of them.
Seventy seven stroke patients with neglect and 31 individuals who did not experience a stroke were used in this study, and the stroke patients underwent fcMRI and neuropsychological tests two weeks and then three months after their stroke. The “healthy” people underwent fcMRI and the test three months apart.
The results showed that the people with neglect who had the best recoveries had brain patterns similar to those who were healthy.
“We think that the original networks form during early development to be as efficient as possible,” said Ramsey in statement. “So when a part gets damaged, in order to get back to normal functioning, you need to restore old wiring. Nothing else is going to work as well.”
According to the announcement, treatment for stroke is centered on the first few hours, when rapid intervention with drugs or surgery can prevent brain tissue from dying. Once the damage is done though, a patient’s options are limited to behavioral interventions such as physical therapy.
“Our goal is to use some of the techniques we developed in these papers to map patterns of dysfunction in individual patients, and then use those maps to guide interventions to restore normal communication between brain regions,” said Corbetta.
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