Three days after her 21st birthday, Jenifer Schuerman had a stroke. When
she emerged from her coma in the hospital, she was completely unaware
of the left side of her body.
"Initially, there was no left side. It didn't dawn on me that there was
another side," said Schuerman, now a 28-year-old student at Arizona
State University.
If a family member spoke or a TV set blared from the left side of her
bed, Schuerman could only look to the right. Initially, she said she was
even unaware that her left side was completely paralyzed. After she
could walk again, she constantly ran into walls on her left side.
"It was bizarre because my brain only acknowledged the right side," she
said. "It's one of the most frustrating feelings I have ever
experienced."
Doctors call the condition hemispatial neglect, and some studies
estimate that 20 to 50 percent of stroke patients struggle with this
lopsided condition. It happens most often when a stroke damages the
right half of the brain.
A group of Italian researchers reported today that using magnets to
stimulate the nerve cells of the brain can help remedy the condition.
The treatment is called transcranial magnetic stimulation, and happens
when doctors place a large electromagnetic coil against the scalp,
creating electrical currents in one part of the brain.
"The treatment is based on the theory that hemispatial neglect results
when a stroke disrupts the balance between the two hemispheres of the
brain. A stroke on one side of the brain causes the other side to become
overactive, and the circuits become overloaded," study author Dr.
Giacomo Koch of the Santa Lucia Foundation in Rome said in a news
release.
Koch and his colleagues studied whether using magnetic stimulation would
help rebalance the activity on both sides of the brain. They tested 20
patients with hemispatial neglect, giving magnetic stimulation to 10
patients and a sham treatment to the other 10 patients. After two weeks,
the patients who were magnetically stimulated performed 16 percent
better on tests measuring their behavioral inattention, and their test
scores improved by 23 percent after one month. The patients with the
sham treatment showed no improvement.
The study was published today in the journal Neurology.
Even without treatment, patients can recover from hemispatial neglect
after a few weeks. But Dr. Randolph Marshall, chief of the stroke
division of Columbia University Medical Center in New York City, said
the first few weeks of progress after a stroke, which are vital in a
patient's overall recovery, can be derailed by the condition.
"The weakness they have from the stroke may be harder to rehabilitate
because they can't pay attention to that weak limb," Marshall said.
"Recovery will be delayed and potentially less robust if they're unable
to participate fully and take advantage of their returning strength."
Other researchers have studied different methods of brain stimulation to
speed recovery in stroke patients. British scientists reported in
September that mild electrical currents
sped up the brain's learning processes, a potentially promising
development for impaired stroke survivors. Other researchers have
experimented with magnetic stimulation in stroke patients, but doctors
say the latest study's results are the most promising evidence so far
that the treatment could actually work.
The study was a small one, however, and doctors emphasize that magnetic
stimulation needs much more testing to determine whether it's a more
effective treatment than the attention and concentration training that
many stroke patients receive. And, ultimately, the real test of whether
it works won't be found in a laboratory setting.
"The real test is how such an incremental decrease in visuospatial
neglect improves functioning in daily activities, such as eating from
both sides of the plate, finding people off to the neglected side when
they speak and crossing the street safely," said Dr. Bruce Dobkin,
director of the Neurologic Rehabilitation and Research Program at the
University of California, Los Angeles.
By CARRIE GANN (@carrie_gann) , ABC News Medical Unit
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