Race aids healing for ex-wife of dementia patient

HONOLULU -- It was "The Pit," the bottom of the humid and desolate dark road leading to the Natural Energy Lab on the Big Island's Kona Coast, and Katherine Nichols had to dig deep to finish the Ironman Triathlon.

The physical and emotional pain of her successful run to the finish line was part of her journey of healing from the physical and emotional strain of being a caregiver for a dementia patient.

"Doing the Ironman this year was very symbolic for me," said the 41-year-old Nichols. "It was gaining the physical, mental and emotional strength to get through this journey. It has been part of my recovery from losing my husband."

Nichols is the former wife of Dr. Edwin Cadman, former dean of the University of Hawaii medical school, who went public with his illness when he resigned the prestigious post shortly after being diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia, a type of frontotemporal dementia, in March 2005. next....

St. John’s Speech Professor Linda Carozza to be Featured in Advance For Speech-Language Pathologists & Audiologists

Linda Carozza, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, Assistant Professor of Speech at St. John’s University’s Staten Island campus, will be featured in Advance for Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists, along with her colleagues, Tricia Olea-Santos, MS, CCC-SLP, and Therese Marie Abesamis, BS, SLP, in the November 19 issue.

Dr. Carozza and her associates designed a subjective screening tool called the Communicative Effectiveness and Stress Rating Scale (CEASRS), designed to identify the possible role of psychological stress in communication of patients with aphasia, an acquired communication disorder that impairs a person's ability to process language.

Patients suffering with this neurological impairment experience difficulty in speaking, reading and writing, and often suffer from stress related to the condition. Though still in its early stages, Dr. Carozza, Santos and Abesamis hope the CEASRS can provide health care professionals with an appreciation of psychological factors that may affect the communication skills of those with aphasia. Next....

Losing the ability to communicate can be devastating

Rehabilitation is an essential part of recovering from a stroke and one Tyneside unit is celebrating 10 years dedicated to helping patients rebuild their lives. Health reporter Jane Picken found out more.

TUCKED away and nestled in the middle of Newcastle General Hospital’s sprawling site lies a little haven for people recuperating from the devastating results of a stroke.

A stroke’s impact can change a sufferer’s life for good, but at the Cherryburn Stroke Rehabilitation Unit, expert nurses, doctors, physiotherapists, nutritionists and speech therapists are all on hand to help ease severe physical difficulties and restore confidence.

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Don’t Call Him a Filmmaker, at Least Not First

THE paintings on broken plates that made Julian Schnabel an art-world star in the early 1980s seemed to announce their importance not just by their retrograde swagger but also by their sheer weight. Hanging one on a wall was like suspending a cabinet full of Buffalo china.The other day in a former smelting factory near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn a bunch of new paintings that he had hanging on the walls seemed by contrast to be almost weightless, looking as if skeins of smoke had settled on the canvas. But they were actually digitally printed blow-ups of antique French hospital X-rays that he had come across last year in northern Normandy. And as such they were pieces not simply of art but of argument, Mr. Schnabel’s pointed way of saying that while his life as a filmmaker may be threatening to eclipse his life as a painter, he still has his palette firmly in hand.

He found the X-rays in a building near the naval hospital at Berck-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast, where he had just finished directing “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” his movie based on the best-selling memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former editor in chief of Elle magazine in France. In 1995 Mr. Bauby suffered a stroke that left him with a condition called locked-in syndrome, conscious but paralyzed, with only his left eye remaining functional, and he composed the memoir painstakingly by blinking that eye to select letters on a chart.

The movie, which will open Nov. 30 in New York and Los Angeles, has proved to be a kind of hat trick for Mr. Schnabel, whose first film, “Basquiat” in 1996, got a respectable reception considering his inexperience and his share of detractors in the art world, where it was set. His second movie, “Before Night Falls” in 2000, about the gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, established him solidly as a filmmaker, earning an Oscar nomination for its star, Javier Bardem. And “The Diving Bell” has been even more widely praised in the early going, winning Mr. Schnabel the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival and fueling Oscar dreams on the part of Miramax, its American distributor.

The only problem with this track record, of course, is that it has a lot of people describing Mr. Schnabel as a director who paints, and not the other way around. This development does not always sit well with a man who has made thousands of paintings — and millions of dollars from them — over the last 30 years and who once declared that he was the “closest you’ll get to Picasso in this life.” Next....

The Kessler Medical Rehabilitation Research

W e l c o m e !

Do you know someone who has had a stroke or some type of cognitive or mental processing problem, speech or language disorder, visual-spatial disorder, or memory loss?

Do you know:

• Approximately half of the people in the U.S. who have had a stroke will have cognitive problems that are disabling.
• At one time it was believed that if recovery didn’t occur within six months of a stroke, recovery was not possible. However, research has proven differently.

We at the Kessler Medical Rehabilitation Research and Education Corporation’s (KMRREC) Stroke Lab invite you to find out more about the current research done at the KMRREC Stroke Laboratory by clicking on any of the following areas: space, speech and language, strategies for memory, skilled movement, staff, success, faq

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Stroke patients left without speech therapy

Six out of ten local authorities in Sweden do not employ speech therapists for stroke patients, according to figures from the Swedish National Stroke Register.

"This is serious, as there is plenty of evidence that early and intensive speech training pays off," said Ann-Charlotte Laska, consultant at the stroke unit of Stockholm's Danderyd Hospital to Svenska...Next...

On the long road to recovery by Jim Totten

A tall, lean muscular man, Doug Gillis appears to be the example of perfect health.

He's a talented athlete and pitcher who throws an 80 mph softball. He's played on five Team USA softball teams — the U.S. national team — and still plays fast-pitch softball with the Midland Explorers.

Gillis also owns Gillis Softball Academy, a successful business in Wixom where he's comfortable talking before large groups of youth and giving them pointers about the sport he loves.

Besides an irregular heartbeat, the 42-year-old Brighton Township man never gave much thought to health issues, and didn't think he ever would until June 24, 2006.

On that day, Gillis, 41 at the time, suffered a stroke that left his right side paralyzed and took away his ability to talk.Next.........