Stroke patients can often hear, even if they can't speak, and other facts about stroke. Three things you might not know about stroke: 1. People having a stroke usually are able to hear and comprehend what's happening around them.
Aphasia doesn't affect intelligence. Stroke survivors remain mentally alert, even though their speech may be jumbled, fragmented or hard to understand.
Most stroke patients are unaware of the warning signs of stroke and present late because they misjudge the seriousness of their symptoms. Even when patients know that they are having a stroke, most do not seek immediate medical attention.
After a very serious stroke, someone can be unconscious or in a coma for some time. In a coma, the person has very little or no awareness of what's going on around them. Locked-in syndrome is a very rare condition where someone is conscious, but unable to move or speak.
Stroke impacts the brain, and the brain controls our behavior and emotions. You or your loved one may experience feelings of irritability, forgetfulness, carelessness or confusion. Feelings of anger, anxiety or depression are also common.
This is a type of visual hallucination that can occur when there is damage to the midbrain. These hallucinations often involve vivid, colourful scenes with animals, people and patterns. They may disappear within a few weeks, but sometimes carry on for longer.
Symptoms of Prosopagnosia After Stroke
In severe cases, a survivor with prosopagnosia can't recognize familiar faces after stroke – even the faces of close friends and family. Other individuals may have trouble distinguishing between two unknown faces, or even between a face and an object.
Do not let that person go to sleep or talk you out of calling 911. Stroke survivors often complain of suddenly feeling very sleepy when a stroke first happens. “A lot of patients come in and say they went to sleep for a few hours before they came to the hospital because they were tired,” Dr. Humbert notes.
Most individuals see a significant improvement in speech within the first six months of suffering a stroke. During this time, the brain is healing and repairing itself, so recovery is much quicker. But for others, the recovery process can be slow and their aphasia may endure for several more months and even years.
Warning signs of an ischemic stroke may be evident as early as seven days before an attack and require urgent treatment to prevent serious damage to the brain, according to a study of stroke patients published in the March 8, 2005 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
The warning signs of stroke include: Weakness or numbness of the face, arm or leg, usually on one side of the body. Trouble speaking or understanding. Problems with vision, such as dimness or loss of vision in one or both eyes.
Their own speech may also become incoherent. If there is damage to the Broca's area, expressive aphasia can result. A pesron with this condition can understand others but is unable to express themselves verbally. They can think the words but cannot speak them or put them together to make coherent sentences.
About 1 in 3 people who've had a stroke have some trouble with language -- like talking, understanding speech, reading, or writing. The specific effects depend on where the stroke happened in the brain.
After a stroke, around 30% of survivors experience pain. This is most likely to happen soon after a stroke, but can also develop sometime later. Types of post-stroke pain include muscle and joint pain such as spasticity and shoulder pain. Headaches are more common soon after a stroke but should reduce over time.
Help the person lie down.
Keep stroke victims on their side with the head slightly elevated to promote blood flow. It may slow the process. “Help them lie down and be comfortable,” says Cramer.
Despite the likelihood of making a full recovery, life expectancy after stroke incidents can decrease. Unfortunately, researchers have observed a wide range of life expectancy changes in stroke patients, but the average reduction in lifespan is nine and a half years.
Changes in your emotions and to your personality are common after stroke. It's very normal to experience strong emotions after stroke, however these emotional reactions usually get better with time. Longer-term emotional and personality changes can be very challenging.
Stroke survivors with right-brain injuries frequently have speech and communication problems. Many of these individuals have a hard time pronouncing speech sounds properly because of the weakness or lack of control in the muscles on the left side of the mouth and face. This is called “dysarthria.”
The most rapid recovery usually occurs during the first three to four months after a stroke, but some survivors continue to recover well into the first and second year after their stroke. Some signs point to physical therapy.
With the right amount of rehabilitation, a person's speech, cognitive, motor and sensory skills can steadily be recovered. Although just 10% of people fully recover from a stroke, 25% have only minor impairments and 40% have moderate impairments that are manageable with some special care.
Even after surviving a stroke, you're not out of the woods, since having one makes it a lot more likely that you'll have another. In fact, of the 795,000 Americans who will have a first stroke this year, 23 percent will suffer a second stroke.