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Written By: Editorial Team | Published : March 18, 2014 9:58 AM IST
New research suggests that dreams of returning to everyday life as it was before the stroke may contribute to the patients' experiences of fatigue and that it may be a help to establish new routines instead of trying to regain old ones. 'Having a stroke can be a devastating experience, and those affected by one often feel that their lives are turned upside down. For many patients, life after a stroke is therefore about reestablishing life as it was before the stroke. But this is very rarely possible and thus a source of frustration for stroke patients,' ethnologist Michael Andersen from University of Copenhagen, said.
Andersen's PhD thesis was carried out in collaboration with a Danish hospital, where doctors found it hard to find a correlation between the size or the impact of the stroke and the individual experiences of fatigue. He located other potential reasons for the fatigue than the patients' brains - their everyday lives. When interviewing the patients Andersen noticed that they no longer related their fatigue to the same objects or actions as they did pre-stroke. (Read: Blood pressure medications not beneficial after stroke)
'In our everyday lives we link fatigue with specific objects or actions which we hardly even notice; it can be a bed or making a cup of tea in the evening. After a stroke, many patients feel constantly fatigued without being able to locate it,' Andersen said. According to him, locating fatigue in other objects and actions than before can be a successful approach when trying to restore an everyday life - not the same as before, but a completely new one. (Read: Coming soon A treatment to rehabilitate stroke patients?)
Andersen suggests that stroke patients might learn to cope with their fatigue if they - in collaboration with their own doctor - learned to think of fatigue in relation to specific objects or actions. This could frame the patients' fatigue so it does not become a phenomenon defining their lives. (Read: Oxygen therapy can reverse brain damage even years after stroke!)
What is stroke?
Also known as a cerebrovascular accident, stroke is a medical emergency that arises when arteries that supply blood to the brain get affected. As a result a part of the brain doesn't receive sufficient blood supply. Without blood and nutrient supply, the brain cells get affected and can die within a few minutes. Stroke often results in long-term dysfunction of the body part controlled by the affected brain area. There are two main types of strokes: ischemic stroke and haemorrhagic stroke. An ischemic stroke is caused due to a block (blood clot) in the blood vessel whereas a haemorrhagic stroke is caused by bleeding through a tear in the blood vessel. (Read: Stroke causes, symptoms, diagnosis, treatment and prevention)
With inputs from ANI
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