Researchers funded by a new two-year, $460K grant from the National Institutes of Health National Institute on Aging hope to shed light on whether mindfulness training could be used therapeutically to help people who have had minor strokes experience more complete recoveries.
“Mindfulness Matters: The Impact of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction on Post-Stroke Cognition” furthers research described in “Poststroke acute dysexecutive syndrome, a disorder resulting from minor stroke due to disruption of network dynamics,” published in the Dec. 29, 2020 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).
In that paper, researchers for the first time provided measurable physiological evidence of diminished neural processing within the brain after a stroke. They also suggested that poststroke acute dysexecutive syndrome (PSADES) is the result of a global connectivity dysfunction. The researchers included Johns Hopkins Associate Professor Elisabeth Marsh (JHU School of Medicine Department of Neurology), Professor Jonathan Simon (ECE/Biology/ISR), Joshua Kulasingham, Christian Brodbeck, Rafael Llinas, Dania Mallick and Rodolfo Llinas. \