New research into stroke recovery

university-of-waikato

Mon Apr 06 2009 12:00:00 GMT+1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)

New research into stroke recovery

Monday, 6 April 2009, 10:57 am
Press Release: University of Waikato

New research into stroke recovery could change the way stroke victims are rehabilitated.

Waikato University PhD student Margaret Dudley is a neuropsychologist who’s been studying the impact of attention process training in early recovery from strokes. She’s working on the Health Research Council funded Stroke Attention Rehabilitation Trial (START) project, which is led by University of Auckland researcher Dr Suzanne Barker-Collo.

Dudley says the research will examine psychological aspects of recovery, in this case attention training, which is thought to be hugely important in the early stages of recovery. She has received a Health Research Council Clinical Research Training Fellowship of $150,000 over two years to complete her study for her PhD.

“Stroke rehabilitation is currently more physically based - learning to walk, dress and regain movement,” says Dudley. “There hasn’t been a focus on rehabilitation for cognition, but recovery all starts with the brain”.

Dudley will work with stroke victims at North Shore and Middlemore hospitals, screening more than 90 post-acute stroke victims for attention deficit. Of those who participate in the trial, half will engage in attention training and data on their progress analysed at five weeks and six months post stroke.

Dudley says they start the attention training intervention with simple tests, like getting patients to press a button every time they hear the word ‘two’ in a passage of text, and over time they increase the complexity of instruction and measure the response and success of each patient.

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“With evidence to show the value of attention training, workers in the stroke field will have hard data to provide to district health boards which will strengthen any case for employing neuropsychologists to work in stroke recovery,” she says.

Dudley’s co-supervisor Dr Nicola Starkey from Waikato University’s Psychology Department says the research will benefit not only stroke victims but caregivers and the families of stroke victims too. “This is important research and if attention training can assist and speed up recovery then it’s very exciting.”

ENDS

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