Danae Penn shares her story of stroke

My husband Roger and I lived in Belgium, but in May 1995 he was in England for a submariners meeting where he suffered a stroke and was taken to Milton Keynes NHS Trust Hospital after a dangerous delay because the ambulance drivers insisted on him telling them his name – and he was too aphasic to be able to do that. His submariner friends told me the bad news and I used our holiday insurance policy to get to the hospital and to bring him back to Belgium.

Back in Belgium hospital care could begin at last. A physiotherapist examined his paralysed leg and told me that he would walk again. The neurologist was less optimistic about other success until Roger copied a square, a circle and a triangle (with his left hand). Apparently, that meant that his mind was OK. Both specialists were 100% correct.

Nurturing Stroke Expertise in Emerging Leaders

This year the World Stroke Organization is pleased to partner with the World Heart Federation to contribute state of the art stroke knowledge to the Federation-led ‘Emerging Leaders’ program. The program aims to form and develop a cadre of experts who collaborate, research, and act to reduce premature mortality from cardiovascular disease globally by at least 25% by 2025. The program is one of several partnership initiatives between the two organisations focused on the intersection between CVD and stroke.

The 2017-2018 cohort marks the fifth year of the program and will focus on stroke. Previous cohorts have focused on access to essential medicines, secondary prevention of cardiovascular diseases, raised blood pressure, and tobacco prevention and control. 

  

Refining the Ischaemic Penumbra with Topography PODCAST

Refining the Ischaemic Penumbra with Topography

It has been forty years since the ischaemic penumbra was first conceptualised through work on animal models. The topography of penumbra has been portrayed as an infarcted core surrounded by penumbral tissue and an extreme rim of oligaemic tissue. In the paper‘Refining the Ischaemic Penumbra with Topography’ first Author Thanh Phan et al reviewed the understanding of the topography of the ischaemic penumbra from the initial experimental animal models to current developments with neuroimaging which have helped to further define the temporal and spatial evolution of the penumbra and refine our knowledge. 

Carmen Lahiff-Jenkins, Managing Editor of the International Journal of Stroke spoke to Dr Thanh Phan, Monash University, Department of Medicine, Victoria, Australia.