Nordic Stroke 2013

http://www.nordicstroke2013.lt/lt/organization

International Stroke Conference; six days away

The International Stroke Conference starts in six days and we invite all attendees to update via email or through the blog and tell us and other strokologists unable to attend this exciting event, all about the newest things in stroke. 

Things of note:

Sandy Middleton from Australia will receive the Stroke article of the year award this year at the Nurses symposium. Sandy has been working on swallowing in post stroke care. IJS have had the opportunity to publish Dr Middleton many times, her presentation skills are exemplary and her science and research approach, excellent. This will be a worthwhile session.

An outcomes approach to stroke care: the importance of teamwork and evidence-based nursing care

   

NS 3-Rehabilitation and Recovery: An Ongoing Process 

Presenter:

Stephanie Vaughn, Fullerton, CA the session, Clinician Driven Assessment and Supportive Interventions for Men in Caregiving Families looks very interesting and will be an interesting presentation. Good luck choosing the sessions you plan to attend from this smorgasbord of choice. Head here to plan your conference week at ISC

Biomarker Summit 2013

BIOMARKER SUMMIT 2013March 20-22, 2013 

Bringing your attention to the biomarker summit 2013 - time to register ... if you have an interest in biomarkers (and let's face it who doesn't) then IJS has recently, in our translational science edition published 

Blood biomarkers in stroke: research and clinical practice

1. William Whiteley^1,*, 
2. Yingfang Tian², 
3. Glen C. Jickling²

Keywords:

• biomarker;
• diagnosis;
• prediction;
• research;
• stroke

Blood biomarkers may have applications in stroke diagnosis, outcome prediction, or treatment. In this article, we provide a focused review on some of the methodological challenges and potential developments of biomarkers in stroke. We review the approaches to the development of a diagnostic blood marker: a candidate marker approach, marker panels, and –omics. Then we examined the role of blood markers to predict recurrent stroke and treatment response in stroke.

Speaking of blood biomarkers IJS have a gorgeous interview with Barbo Johannssen coming to iTunes soon, where she speaks on her early interest in biomarkers and blood in the 60s.

World Stroke Academy

World Stoke Academy

The World Stroke Academy is an online educational resource that can contribute to CPD/CME points and the sharing of information and knowledge. The current focus is Paediatric Stroke authored by Professor Nabil Kitchener, Dr. Gabrielle deVeber and Dr Vijeya Ganesan.

You can upload podcasts, and a well of various information, at your fingertips. We know these tools are looking great, and getting better all the time, we know the content is excellent for the best authors in stroke, but what we don't know is how you feel about it, and we'd love to hear your responses to the new look WSA.

  

IJS rehabilitation edition OUT NOW

At IJS we are often asked the question, 'why don't you have a rehabilitation section in your journal?' and we always answer that as stroke rehabilitation is such an essential part of stroke as a whole that it cannot be regulated to one simple section. With that in mind we have acquiessed to some extent and put together for our readers immediate accessibility a special themed rehabilitation edition. This is really to emphasise stroke rehabilitation in the field and not to make rehab a separate section.

When we approached the wonderful Associate Professor Julie Bernhardt and Professor Steve Cramer they were both brimming with ideas of how to pull together an edition that would bring together the most important aspects of stroke rehabilitation. They have of course done a splendid job. 

Access to IJS directly, Rehab edition is free access

Editorial

We have focused an entire edition of the International Journal of Stroke with guest editors Associate Professor Julie Bernhardt and Professor Steven Cramer on rehabilitation for a very good reason. For those of us who manage stroke patients on a regular basis, there are a number of obvious issues, which often arise. The first is that the acute stroke process is often only the beginning of what becomes a lifelong disability, the consequences which are entirely born by the individual and their families; second, while we are accumulating significant amounts of evidence-based knowledge about stroke prevention and acute therapy, there is still a paucity of evidence-based knowledge about recovery and rehabilitation.

Assembling this volume, Professors Bernhardt and Cramer have drawn together strands of information from the basic sciences, right through to the global World Health Organization perspective about rehabilitation generally. The burden of stroke during the rehabilitation phase and beyond in terms of life-years is enormous. The prolonged phase of disability for the patient and limited evidence pool to guide practitioners and families remain a sleeping giant of stroke medicine. We hope that this edition may fuel the great awakening.

Professor Geoffrey A. Donnan

Read Stroke disability and rehabilitation of stroke: World Health Organization

Festive season

The festive season specifically for those following the Gregorian calendar, has just wrapped up and we at IJS office are having a well deserved (if we may say it) break from the lovely job of putting together this wonderful journal and all its accoutrements for you the readers, the authors and the reviewers. So, if you have been watching us, and noticing our voice is a little quieter at this time of year, never fear because as this year rolls over we will be doing more, offering more, working even closer with the World Stroke Academy, which is now online; and bringing you the voices of the SSOs globally. As many of you will find tech commentators are excitedly predicating a wonderful year for eLearning. The potential for people to explore actively, on so many platforms information, debate and knowledge from experts is full of all kinds of potential.

Keep your eye on the blog, and sign up to receive our posts.