People with stroke due to brain haemorrhage have swelling around the haemorrhage on their brain scan. More swelling worsens recovery. No treatment improves outcome after this swelling.
The programme will use biological information about cells and molecules, and information from patients, to design a study of treatment for swelling after brain haemorrhage.
Existing vision tests do not tell us how a patient’s life will be influenced by their vision problems. This project aims to understand how the results of vision tests relate to how stroke survivors will be able to function in their daily lives.
Stroke survivors and their relatives consistently ask for information about how much recovery can be expected. This study will look at how well a patient can use their arm after stroke, and at their brain images recorded within 72-hours after stroke. The hope is that brain images can improve our prediction of patient arm movement recovery at six months after stroke.
Although speech and language therapists (SLTs) may help aphasia patients with their rehabilitation, there remains a clear lack of evidence-based treatments available for them to help their patients with problems of everyday talking, known as ‘discourse’. This study aims to address both the need for evidence-based treatments and improvement of clinical expertise to address discourse problems after stroke.
This study will investigate whether early initiation of direct anticoagulant drugs will be as safe as later initiation in stroke patients with an abnormal heart rhythm (atrial fibrillation). It will also investigate whether early initation could lead to fewer recurrent strokes.
People who have survived a previous stroke or transient ischaemic attack (TIA) are at particularly high risk of subsequent, ‘recurrent’ stroke with 30% having another stroke in the following five years. High blood pressure is the most important reversible risk factor for having a recurrent stroke. The aim of this study is to develop and test a self-monitoring system of high blood pressure, tailored to the needs of stroke and TIA survivors, which will include self-adjustment of medication where possible in consultation with a GP.
The aim of this research programme is to develop a human brain bank to support biomedical research into the pathophysiology of human SVD that may be used nationally and internationally.
Inflammation is an important defence mechanism that the body uses in response to injury or infection. However, it can also be highly damaging to the brain directly after stroke. This study will investigate whether adult stem cells can be transformed and used to reduce inflammation in the brain after stroke, and promote recovey.
The recovery of stroke survivors with language difficulties is famously variable. Some stroke survivors recover much more quickly or fully than others. Some respond to treatment much better than others. The aim of the proposed work is to employ similar techniques to PLORAS project to predict which patients are most suited to what speech and language therapy, which could then help them make their best recovery.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans provide lots of data on the health of a person’s brain, not all of which is routinely used in clinical practice. This project will continue the development of tools to assess the brain scans of people with stroke. The outcome of this research should produce methods that can predict how patients will fare after a stroke, helping doctors to decide the best treatments and improve outcomes.