Stroke

What is It

Stroke, also known as a cerebrovascular accident (CVA), occurs when blood flow is disrupted to the brain. A stroke may occur when one of the arteries providing blood flow to the brain is blocked or when one of these arteries is ruptured, causing a bleed to occur. A stroke may impact one or both sides of the brain, resulting in survivors experiencing different complications.

Common complications resulting from stroke include cognitive, psychological, and physical problems. Cognitively, stroke survivors often have processing speed, memory, language, attention, executive functioning, visual-spatial skill, and motor skill deficits.

If a stroke occurs on the left side of the brain, a stroke survivor may have aphasia or the loss of language. Stroke survivors typically work with speech therapists, occupational therapists, psychologists, and physical therapists in order to recover and rehabilitate from their stroke.

There are 3 Different Types of Strokes

Ischemic Stroke

Ischemic strokes occur when a clot occurs within the brain’s arteries or veins that causes blood flow to stop reaching the brain tissue. The clot can form when a blood vessel gets blocked, which then causes reduced blood flow, allowing for the build-up of fatty deposits. These fatty deposits form into blood clots which have the potential to drift into one’s brain. If that occurs, blood, oxygen, and nutrients are denied from reaching the brain tissue, causing the tissue to be damaged or die. Ischemic strokes are the most common type of stroke, with around 87% of all strokes being one. Recently studies have found that there might be a link between being infected with COVID-19 and ischemic strokes.

Hemorrhagic Stroke

In a similar way to ischemic strokes, a hemorrhagic stroke occurs when a blood vessel from the brain ruptures or begins to leak. Many factors cause a hemorrhagic, such as uncontrolled high blood pressure, aneurysms, trauma, protein deports, and even ischemic. The rupture of an abnormal tangle of the arteriovenous malformation, a thin blood vessel, is another less common way to cause a brain bleed. Over 750,000 people experience a hemorrhagic stroke each year.

Transient Ischemic Attacks (TIAs)

A TIA, also known as a ministroke, is when one faces symptoms similar to a stroke in a temporary period of time. These ministrokes do not cause permanent damage but leave victims facing symptoms for around five minutes. It is related to an ischemic stroke because a TIA occurred when one experiences reduced blood flow to part of the nervous system caused by a clot of debris. It is important to note that you need to seek emergency care even when your TIA symptoms worsen. It is impossible to self-diagnose the difference between a TIA and a stroke, which is why it is crucial to call your doctor or emergency care provider. When a TIA goes untreated, it often can increase the risk of having a full stroke in the future.

What Can Be Done for Stroke Patients?

Because stroke survivors have complex needs, their cognitive rehabilitation therapy must be adaptable and individualized. With HappyNeuron Pro, clinical providers can provide targeted and customized cognitive rehabilitation therapy for their patients with stroke. From targeting communication complications from the stroke to remembering where they were going in a store, HappyNeuron Pro can help with the rehabilitation of individuals.

Using HappyNeuron Pro in stroke recovery

Regardless of the effects experienced by the patient, HappyNeuron Pro offers a wide variety of cognitive exercises for stroke which can be used in treatment. Our 45 cognitive exercises work out different cognitive functions so that the patient may exercise the specific functions that have been affected in their situation. Clinicians can help their patients practice processing speed, memory, language, attention, executive function, processing speed, and visual-spatial skills through these cognitive exercises.

With our adaptability features, the exercises can be tailored to the patient’s specific needs and made to be the appropriate difficulty level for them.

If the patient has aphasia, verbal memory and language exercises may be helpful. Aphasia patients may work with a Speech Language Pathologist (SLP) on recognizing letter sounds, producing speech, vocabulary and word meanings, and on forming full sentences. Many SLPs use digital cognitive exercises such as HappyNeuron Pro’s to work on these skills.

Other cognitive skills such as auditory processing, memory, visual-spatial skills, and attention can be worked on, usually with an Occupational Therapist. Occupational Therapists may use digital cognitive exercises with patients to practice these cognitive skills.

HappyNeuron Pro’s exercises can be used with individual patients, and in a group therapy context. They may be completed remotely or in-person, and home workouts can be assigned to the patient so they get consistent practice in between sessions with the clinician.

Based on research, we recommend that Cognitive Rehabilitation should take place for a minimum of 4 weeks, for 30 minutes to 1 hour per day.

Recommended exercises

The best exercises for each stroke patients will vary based on the effects each individual has experienced from a stroke. We recommend getting familiar with all of our exercises. You can learn more about each individual exercise on our site, including our memory exercises, language exercises, executive functioning exercises, and visual-spatial exercises and discern which exercises are the best fit for your patient’s needs.

(With a free trial, you can play all of our exercises and even try them with your patients!)

Here are a few of the HappyNeuron Pro exercises most commonly used with stroke patients.

Memory Exercises

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I Remember You!

Visual and verbal working memory

Heraldry

Attention, visual working memory

An American In Paris

Verbal and visual working memory

Language Exercises

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Embroidery

Strategy

Secret Files

Working memory, reasoning

Root it Out

Lexical Spelling

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Attention Exercises

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Find Your Way!

Planning

Private Eye

Visual Attention

Ancient Writing

Pattern Recognition

Customer Working in Stroke Recovery

“I found that I was building a lot of the programming myself. I would spend a lot of time in program planning trying to find the activities that I want to use. I find that HappyNeuron Pro does the work for me. It is easy to access and I like the information portion of it.”

Karin Harrison, West Shore Stroke Recovery – Stroke Recovery Association of British Columbia – Vancouver, British Columbia – Canada

Read their story: Innovating Stroke Recovery with Digital Cognitive Therapy Tools