A drink a day linked to lower stroke risk

  A drink a day has been linked to lower stroke risk. Two to three drinks a day can have the opposite effect, however.
Women who enjoy a drink a day will cheer the results of the latest study on alcohol consumption: It found light to moderate drinking is linked to reduced stroke risk.
Heavy consumption, however, appears to raise stroke risk.
Researchers analyzed the drinking habits and stroke incidence in more than 80,000 women taking part in the Nurses Health Study and found:
• Those who averaged the equivalent of a half-glass of wine a day had a 17 percent lower risk of stroke than abstainers.
• One glass a day was linked to a 21 percent lower risk.
• One to two glasses a day was linked to a 13 percent reduct
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Alcohol may lower stroke risk in women

Light-to-moderate alcohol consumption is associated with a lower risk of stroke in women, a new study has claimed.
Monik Jimenez ScD from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) examined data from 83,578 female participants in the Nurses' Health Study.
They looked at data of women who had no evidence of cardiovascular disease or cancer at baseline and followed them for up to 26 years. Participants provided information on diet, including self-reported alcohol consumption, lifestyle factors and stroke events.
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Voicegrams transform brain activity into words Computational models decode and reconstruct neural responses to speech.

Nature | News

Voicegrams transform brain activity into words

Computational models decode and reconstruct neural responses to speech.

• Mo Costandi

31 January 2012

Spoken words can be reconstructed from the way neurons react in the brain.

OSCAR BURRIEL/SPL

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The brain’s electrical activity can be decoded to reconstruct which words a person is hearing, researchers report today in PLoS Biology¹.
Brian Pasley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues recorded the brain activity of 15 people who were undergoing evaluation before unrelated neurosurgical procedures. The researchers placed electrodes on the surface of the superior temporal gyrus (STG), part of the brain's auditory system, to record the subjects’ neuronal activity in response to pre-recorded words and sentences.
The STG is thought to participate in the intermediate stages of speech processing, such as the transformation of sounds into phonemes, or speech sounds, yet little is known about which specific features, such as syllable rate or volume fluctuations, it represents.......
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Study: Stroke score helps determine need for add-on strategies

Researchers in Europe have designed and validated a simple, fast and cost-free scoring system to predict outcomes for ischemic stroke patients treated with intravenous alteplase. In their study published Feb. 7 in Neurology, the authors suggested the score could be used to identify patients who might benefit from add-on rescue strategies such as endovascular treatments or hypothermia, if the model holds up after further validation................
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Study aims to see if stem cells could aid stroke recovery

EMILY ROSE BENNETT/STAFF

Chris Woods, 45, of Tignall, Ga., recovers at Medical College of Georgia Hospital after suffering a major stroke Thursday. Woods is taking part in a clinical trial examining whether stem cells can help in the recovery process after a severe stroke.

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Chris Woods lay in a bed Friday at Medi­cal College of Georgia Hospital after a massive stroke made his left arm useless. But don’t tell him that.
“I can move it,” he said defiantly, though the arm didn’t move. “I can hit pretty hard with it.”
Something the 45-year-old construction worker from Tignall received hours before could help him do that.
Woods is the second patient in a clinical trial at Georgia Health Sciences University testing whether stem cells derived from bone marrow could help patients recover from a severe stroke.
Dr. David Hess, the chairman of GHSU’s De­partment of Neurology, has been working with the company Athersys to help develop and test the cells, which are derived from healthy donors, tested and packaged so they can be stored in most hospital settings and given without the need to match blood type. Unlike embryonic stem cells, the cells have a very low risk of spawning a tumor, and so far they shown few side effects, Hess said.
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Strokes can strike at any age

When Cody Dietz wouldn’t wake up the morning after a party, his friends thought he had a hangover and let him sleep. They never thought that their 17-year-old friend had suffered a stroke that could have taken his life.

View full sizeSubmitted photoCody Dietz is nearly fully recovered from the stroke he suffered in 2008, although he still participates in physical, occupational, vision and aquatic therapy.

“His friend’s father called me and said ‘Your son is incoherent. Can I call 911?’” said Cody’s mother, Bonnie Dietz, remembering the events of July 30, 2008. The boys had been drinking at another location the previous night and had come to his friend’s house afterward, she said.
At York Hospital’s emergency room, a CAT scan revealed their son had suffered a large left-brain stroke. He was taken by Life Lion helicopter to Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, where his neurologist Dr. Ray Reichwein had no time to waste in making lifesaving decisions.
“The timeline of the diagnosis is key. Many of the therapies have the best outcome when done within six hours; Cody’s delay in diagnosis was close to 12 hours,” said Reichwein, who could not use some of the standard therapies because of the delay.
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