Stroke--Continue.

Procedures

With speedy drug treatment, there's a good chance that problems such as numbness, weakness and difficulties with Speech, vision and swallowing will improve on their own over the following weeks. your powerful brain will also reassign tasks previously performed by its damaged parts. But sometimes months of therapy will await you. Strokes are very individual, affecting different areas of each person's brain so what you'll want from rehabilitation may be very different from someone else's needs. You may have to learn require speech therapy or help with swallowing. Many therapies are available; one or more of the following may be right for you:

• Physiotherapy. It's best to start intensive rehabilitation as soon as your blood pressure, pulse and breathing have stabilised--as early muscles strong and prevent them from stiffening up and developing tight contractions. Passive movements initiated by the therapist eventually give way to more active exercises on your part. By moving around, you may also avoid painful pressure sores.
• Neurodevelopmental treatment (NDT). Rehabilitation methods once taught people to compensate for lost function by working with their unaffected side and adding canes, braces and walkers for support. A treatment introduced by the British in the 1970s, NDT concentrates instead on enhancing the residual function in nerves and muscles on the stroke-damaged side of the body.

A PRESTROKE WARNING. Brief episodes that result in temporary (24-hour) loss of function aren't true strokes. They're called transient ischaemic attacks (TIAs) and often signal an impending stroke. One in five people who has a TIA will have a stroke within 12 months. 

                                           SIDESTEP A SECOND STROKE 

Once you've had a stroke, you're at very high risk for another. This makes preventing a recurrence crucial. There's a lot you can do to increase your odds of a stroke free future.

• Stop smoking. It nearly doubles your risk for stroke.
• Get exercise. The goal is not to be a superathlete but to exercise consistently.
• Watch your weight. The less you weigh, the less pressure on the heart and vessels.
• Know your blood pressure. Check it regularly and religiously take medicines for lowering it; hypertension ups the stroke risk four-to sixfold.
• Limit alcohol intake to no more than seven drinks a week.
• Control stress through exercise, yoga or any other means that works for you.
• Eat your way to health. Flexible blood vessels, good circulation and lower blood pressure are just a few of the stroke-repairing benefits of eating nutritiously. Focus on citrus fruit, dietary fibre, cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cabbage), calcium-rich dairy products and fatty fish(salmon and tuna). Have 125 g of fatty fish two to four times a week to dramatically reduce your risk for a clot-related stroke.
• Control your heart disease or high cholesterol. Stick closely to your medication and treatment plan. Atrial fibrillation is a stroke risk factor requiring anticoagulants. High cholesterol leads to hardening of the arteries.

• Constraint-induced movement therapy. Researchers are finding this approach can help retrieve a person's ability to move a limb, even years after a stroke. In one study, stroke victims with right-side paralysis had their non-paralysed arm immobilised, forcing them to use their paralysed one. Most (11 of 13) participants experienced real improvement in their impaired arms, making daily basis such as brushing teeth and combing hair possible again.
• Occupational therapy (OT). During these sessions, the therapist helps you retrain your brain to control certain small muscle groups so that you can resume daily basics (swallowing, using the toilet, cooking, writing). This helps not only your motor skills but also your independence and morale.
• Speech therapy. When you're having trouble forming words and sentences but the thoughts are right there in your head, dramatic results can be realised with speech therapy, Pantomime, sign language and pen and paper can also help get your point across.

Once you've had a stroke, there's little a surgeon can do; brain tissue has died and even if a clot is removed, restored blood flow can't bring the tissue  back to life. But there are scenarios in which surgery makes sense. If you've had a cerebral thrombosis (or a prestroke TIA) caused by an internal carotid artery blockage (responsible for about 9 percent of strokes), a carotid endarterectomy to clean out this artery in the neck can reduce your risk of a future stroke. It's commonly done if the artery is more than 70 percent blocked. 
  Very mixed results have been had with a decades-old procedure called extracranial-intracranial bypass (EC-IC) in which surgeons reroute a healthy artery in the scalp to an area that was deprived of blood because of an artery blockage. There's hope that with new imaging techniques and refinements in surgery, this type of bypass will become safer and more effective for certain people. Cartoid angioplasty, based on the same principles as angioplasty for heart disease, is currently being investigated as an EC-IC alternative.

>DEMENTA FOLLOWING A STROKE is often attributed to brain damage when depression may really be to blame. Antidepressant medications and counselling often can ease these problems.