Kessler Foundation Shares Post-Stroke Disabilities Research

Steve Adubato goes on-location to the Kessler Foundation’s Life after Stroke event to speak with Dr. A.M. Barrett, Director of Stroke Rehabilitation at the Kessler Foundation, about her research on post-stroke disabilities like spatial neglect - a disability where stroke victims lose the ability to perceive and/or respond to stimuli on one side of the body.

9/21/16 #1907

Excerpt:

"We're here with Dr. A. M. Barrett who is director of stroke rehabilitation research at Kessler Foundation we're here at a terrific conference in West Orange, New Jersey, life after stroke innovations in research reclaiming life, and regaining independence. doctor, we've talked many times in this studio, but the question is this particular issue this conference, why significant? We're gonna talk today about how problems, not only the problems you can see, but the problems you can't see, affect people after stroke. how it can limit their lives and how we can make them better such as? After a stroke, the gps in our brains that tells us where things are, can be broken it can give us the wrong information, but almost never do we find out that we have this problem after a stroke and almost never do we get the treatments, so we're trying to address that in the Kessler Foundation. Yeah, you may see around the doctor's neck, and she brought this in the studio, we were taping a program and she brought these goggles in the studio, and they are called? Prism adaptation goggles. Say it again? Optical prism goggles. Okay, and they are particularly, for a particular kind of ailment that people deal with after a stroke which is called? Spacial neglect. Talk about spacial neglect and then talk about the goggles. Well when people have had a stroke that affects the right brain, we all know that the right brain's supposed to be kind of creative, and innovative. well this right brain tells us where our bodies are at all times, right? So you've seen me do this demonstration before when I put on my glasses when my eyes close I can do it because my right brain knows all the coordinates and knows how to make the movement but what can happen when somebody has spatial neglect is they lose that ability and what's interesting is when you make these kind of mistakes, people don't say "oh, the person has had a stroke, there's a problem going on in her brain" instead, they think "oh, you know, she's not trying she's got some kind of issue”. What does that person see? That person is seeing the world in a different way than you and I are and when they wear these goggles that change what they see, you know you can see that the goggles have a curve on them, a surface curve and they change where you see things so that the distortion in the world is corrected... "