I was wondering if it is possible for a person to have a stroke which might be a beneficial event instead of a detrimental one. Have any of you medics ever heard of this happening?
Thanks
Quasi
Just some firsthand experience.
When my mother had her stroke in '86, she came out of it with diminished physical capacity, but her hearing in the ear that had been faulty had returned to normal. Probably bizarre, but true.
Otherwise, WAG, I don’t think there’s any pluses to strokes. Just a whole lot of heartbreaking minuses.
And my mother, who had a stroke a couple of years ago, says that the headache she had had more or less every day through her entire life had vanished. On the other hand I have a feeling that what caused the stroke alse caused the headache.
Interesting question Quasi. Were you getting at anything in particular?
I have taken care of hundreds, maybe over a thousand, people with strokes and can’t recall any obvious benefits in any of the cases.
Conceivably, a so-called warning stroke (TIA = Transient Ischemic Attack) is of benefit since it alerts the person to their risk and corrective measures can be taken (maybe).
My WAG on this is no. Take any fragile and complex system (like your computer), hit it with a hammer, and see how often this yields a benefit. This situation might be similar to your stroke scenario.
Another analogy might be the introduction of mutations into DNA. Generally, this is not a good thing. However, over millions of years and billions of mutational events, DNA mutagenesis (plus selection of mutants) gives rise to evolution. But as with the computer/hammer and brain/stroke situations, the overwhelming majority of the time, the outcome fo ramdom mutagenesis is bad.
Diploid organisms preserve function in the face of adverse mutations by having a second good copy of each gene. The problem with brains is you only have one.
Often, patients recover quite a bit of functionality after a stroke. The nervous (especially in the young) posesses a considerable degree of plasticity. Damage to one pathway or region can often be partially or fully compensated by another region of the CNS assuming the function of the damaged region over time.
Well, Karl, I was thinking of the Electro Schock Therapy (EST) that was so prevalent in the 60’s. Wasn’t that a way of inducing a “stroke” to the brain? I was just wondering if such a thing could occur spontaneously. Off topic: Are you posting from Germany or are you German? I always enjoy conversing with fellow German nationals. My e-mail address is posted here somewhere if you’d like to correspond.
Thanks
Quasi
Sometimes a stroke may have the effect of reducing a person’s inhibitions or their ability to control their impulses. Others might see this as a personality improvement in people who were formerly very reserved or repressed. But it is more likely to be annoying, not to mention embarassing for the stroke victim.
Think stroke is to brain as heart attack is to heart. Both events lead to the death of tissue and are (usually) the result of occluded blood flow. EST is used to treat severe depression which is refractory to drug therapy. EST induces temporary seizure-like activity, but no strokes.
Quasimodem, in response to your analogy between shock therapy and a stroke, I think that choosybeggar said it well. Strokes kill brain cells. I could speculate that shock therapy resets (?reboots) networks in the brain, but causes little or no cell death.
my dad had a tia and despite really really not wanting one, he got a pacemaker. What a wonderful invention…it works like a charm, totally painless and everyone who got one that I ever heard of is so glad they did.
Sorry, Quasimodem, but ECT (Electroconvulsive therapy) is basically similar to a unilateral seizure; it has little or nothing in common with a stroke. The brain is not being deprived of blood at all. It is used almost exclusively for major depression, although I think I’ve read about it being used for extreme psychosis.
And don’t assume it’s no longer prevalent - it’s an excellent therapeutic device; especially since it has been refined. It has a higher success rate (60-79% depending on the study you read) than drug therapies or psychotherapies, and is generally faster acting. However, it does have a slight reputation problem and ugly-assed side effects, so it’s not used unless a person has a particularly severe and treatment-resistant depression. It is still a fairly widely used therapeutic device in these cases, all things considered.
I can see how the similarities could be drawn; ECT patients frequently have short-term retrograde amnesia and temporary disorientation, the origins of which are unknown. It used to be that the side effects were more pronounced because the seizure was induced bilaterally and there were no muscle relaxants used beforehand to prevent fractures due to flailing about. Nasty side effect, that fractured femur.
ECT’s methods of working are not well known. There are numerous theories on how it works; one of which is the ‘reboot’ theory that KarlGauss mentioned.
I don’t know a great deal about strokes, so I’m avoiding that area and focusing on what I do know. I realize this is something of a hijack, but I hope it’s at least a little illuminating.
A lesion in the brain is basically an area of cells that have died. A stroke causes lesions, which is rarely a good thing in the brain–they don’t regenerate all that well.
However, I can think of one neurological condition that a surgical lesion is used to treat, as a last-ditch final resort; in people suffering with dangerous grand mal seizures that drugs aren’t effective at treating, the corpos callosum (the primary bridge between the two sides of the brain) is severed. That prevents the seizure activity from spreading anywhere near as far, and generally results in them improving. (Along with some quite interesting effects like being able to look at something through one’s left field of vision only, seeing an object and knowing what it is, but being completely unable to name it until the right field and thus left hemisphere gets a look as well.)
Of course, this is a “lesion” that’s done in a very precise way in a very certain location. A stroke causes massive cell death without any kind of precision downstream from where the blockage took place. But, it’s conceivable in a totally unlikely snowball’s-chance-in-hell way, that a stroke could just happen to cause a lesion that would, say, prevent or reduce seizures. But I think every epileptic throughout history to the present day could have strokes of random sizes repeatedly, and never have that occur.