Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Stroke Screening

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Willie Askew, 78, says the symptoms came on suddenly with blurry vision and weakness.

Askew was not too worried but went to the hospital after the urging of his family.

Sure enough, the doctors at Providence Hospital in Washington, D.C. found something very wrong. Askew was having a stroke.

Providence hospital neurologist Dr. Muneshwar Tiwari says Askew's stroke was caused by blocked arteries in his brain, the result of high cholesterol and hypertension, two risk factors that could have been treated early if he had just be........Next

High blood pressure, anemia put sickle cell kids at risk for strokes

A team of researchers from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, Vanderbilt University and elsewhere have demonstrated that high blood pressure and anemia together put children with sickle cell disease at serious danger for symptomless, or “silent,” strokes, although either condition alone also signaled high risk.
The results are part of an ongoing National Institutes of Health–funded international multicenter trial, believed to be the largest study of its kind to date in children with sickle cell disease, or SCD. A report on the findings was published online Nov. 17 in the journal Blood.
In the study, brain MRI scans revealed that nearly a third (31 percent) of 814 children, ages 5 to 15, had suffered silent strokes. None of the children had a history of stroke or seizures, and none showed overt stroke signs at the time of the study.....Next

Thursday, January 12, 2012

ESL instruction videos teaching more than English on YouTube

Because the materials are available openly, that means there’s potential for unexpected repurposing of these lessons. One example is the story of Dave Valiulis, a technical writer and Ph.D who suffered a stroke in 2008 and has since been dealing with the effects of aphasia and apraxia, which damaged his ability to access words and manipulate his mouth to speak clearly.
After completing two years of professional speech therapy, Valiulis “graduated” and was left to improve his ability to talk on his own. Initially he went looking for things related to aphasia and apraxia, with little success — but when he discovered the amount of ESL material out there, he found his options widen dramatically. “I thought, ‘Of course — this is what I need! After all, English to a person with aphasia and apraxia is like a second language,’” Valiulis wrote via email....Next