CINCINNATI, Ohio (Ivanhoe Newswire) – Each year, almost 800,000 people in the U.S. will suffer a stroke – that’s one every 40 seconds. For those who survive, recovery can be long and hard. We have all heard about the difficulty patients can have with speaking and walking, but did you know that three quarters of all stroke survivors will have difficulty swallowing? Now, researchers are looking at ways to help people eat and drink after a stroke.
Kevin Moss has been driving, flicking and acing since he was a little boy. A few years ago, Kevin was playing disc golf when something terrible happened.
“I threw a really nice shot, and I felt a pain come up the back of my spine into my neck,” Kevin painfully recalls.
When he reached down to pick up the disk, something else happened.
“I almost went face first into the basket,” he adds.
Kevin suffered a stroke. Along with re-learning how to walk, Kevin had to relearn how to swallow.
“Eating and drinking is something we all take for granted and do every single day,” says Brittany Krekeler, PhD, a Speech Language Pathologist at the University of Cincinnati.
Krekeler is leading a trial at the university to help.
“A lot of patients that are recovering from stroke do have what we call oral phase impairments in swallowing and that their tongue is weak,” Krekeler explains.
Krekeler hopes that the tongueometer — an at home tongue endurance device — may help.
The device has a pressurized bulb that connects to a patient’s smart phone. It gives patients real-time feedback about how hard they are pressing the bulb with their tongue. They complete exercises three times a day for eight weeks to build up endurance. Krekeler stresses, this is only a piece of the rehab puzzle. Along with oral rehab and surgery, Kevin believes it helped him get rid of his feeding tube.
“I eat anything and everything now,” he says happily.
The National Institutes of Health has awarded Krekeler a $660,000 grant to start a larger study with the tongueometer. While the trial is focused on stroke patients, there is potential this therapy could be used for other people who have trouble swallowing, such as survivors of head and neck cancers and Parkinson’s disease.
Contributors to this news report include: Marsha Lewis, Producer; Matt Goldschmidt, Videographer; Roque Correa, Editor.
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