Kessler Foundation Offers Hope to Stroke Victims For Normalcy

At the Kessler Foundation’s Life After Stroke event, Steve Adubato talks with Rodger DeRose, President & CEO of the Kessler Foundation about the innovative research being done at the Foundation, and Audrey Cebulski, a stroke survivor and a beneficiary of the “prism goggle” research that helps treat spatial neglect, a disability where stroke victims lose the ability to perceive and/or respond to stimuli on one side of the body.

10/8/16 #2585

Excerpt:

"Steve Adubato. It is my honor to talk to, once again, our good friend Rodger DeRose, president and chief executive officer of Kessler Foundation. Rodger, there's a crowd gathering here in West Orange, New Jersey for this extraordinary event, Life After Stroke: Innovations and Research Reclaiming Life and Regaining Independence. Talk about this conference. Well Steve, you know we focus on changing the lives of people with disabilities, and stroke is just one of the many areas that we focus on, and tonight's event is really going to be centered on the cognitive issues that stroke patients have the medical interventions that we have brought forward to be used from a translational point of view, right into patient care here at Kessler Institute, and then rolling it out through the state of New Jersey and around the country. And we're also gonna do that on the, in the area of mobility for paralysis related to stroke as well, two very very significant issues for stroke patients. Rodger, let's put this in perspective. Seven million Americans are dealing with stroke, they've had a stroke, but life after a stroke, put that in perspective. What are people dealing with? Sure. Yeah, you know, Steve there... this whole issue of spacial neglect, which is a cognitive issue related to stroke, where there's a... an absence of leftness with a right brain stroke if that is, if that goes undiagnosed, it means that individuals are missing this whole side of their left, and that is something that we're bringing to the party here,., and then there's related... issues related to aphasia, the ability to speak, and what it means is how do those folks integrate with their family? With the community? And back to the workplace if they're still of working age? Kessler Foundation, your role in this? Our role is to focus on new medical interventions that can be used right in patient care, and bring it to patient care as effectively and efficiently as possible so that we can test those interventions here at Kessler Institute in the care centers and then roll them out and disseminate that information nationwide and worldwide. So for people who actually... you talked about spacial, give that term again? Spacial neglect. For people who are not properly diagnosed, who have spatial neglect, this whole left side, they're not seeing what the rest of us see, they're not able to navigate and negotiate, right? Exactly, it's almost as though the brain's GPS system, Steve, misses the left side..."