CINCINNATI, Ohio (Ivanhoe Newswire) – Each year, nearly 800,000 people in the United States have a stroke – that’s one every 40 seconds. For those who survive, recovery can be long and hard. We’ve all heard about the difficulty patients can have talking and walking, but did you know that three-quarters of all stroke patients have trouble swallowing? Now researchers are looking for ways to help people eat and drink after a stroke.
Kevin Moss has been driving, fixing and mastering balls since he was a kid. A few years ago, Moss was playing disc golf when something terrible happened.
“I threw a really nice punch and felt a pain running from my spine up to my neck,” Moss recalls, full of pain.
As he reached down to pick up the disk, something else happened.
“I almost fell face first into the basket,” he adds.
Moss suffered a stroke. Kevin had to relearn not only how to walk but also how to swallow.
“Eating and drinking is something we all take for granted and do every day,” says Dr. Brittany Krekeler, a speech-language pathologist at the University of Cincinnati.
To help, Krekeler is leading an experiment at the university.
“Many patients recovering from a stroke suffer from so-called oral phase disorders when swallowing and a weak tongue,” explains Krekeler.
Krekeler hopes that the tongue measuring device – a tongue duration measuring device for the home – can be helpful.
The device has a pressure pump that is connected to the patient’s smartphone. It gives patients real-time feedback on how hard they are pressing on the pump with their tongue. For eight weeks, they complete exercises three times a day to improve their endurance. Krekeler stresses that this is only one piece of the rehabilitation puzzle. Moss believes that, along with oral rehabilitation and surgery, 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 launch a larger study of the tongue-measuring device. While the study focuses on stroke patients, there is potential that this therapy could be used for other people with swallowing difficulties, such as survivors of head and neck cancer and Parkinson’s disease.
Contributors to this news report include: Marsha Lewis, producer; Matt Goldschmidt, videographer; Roque Correa, editor.
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