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Stroke victims often struggle with the complications for the rest of their lives. Memory loss, difficulty walking, and muscle weakness are among them.
But in one of those twists that happens in medicine sometimes, it now looks like there may be an unlikely aid for those who suffer from stroke.
In mice, it’s recently been found that those who take zolpiderm—a common sleeping pill—also recover from stroke much quicker.
If this could be replicated in humans, it would be a huge deal, especially since stroke is currently America’s leading cause of death.
Only one drug currently exists to limit damage to stroke victims, but it has to be administered within hours of getting a stroke, and often patients miss out on it. Physiotherapy is the most common treatment.
The drug, when used on mice, was effective even days after the strokes had taken place—a huge improvement from the few hours allowed for the current drug.
Mice who were on zolpiderm were able to solve simple problems—such as taking a piece of tape off their paw—a few days after a stroke, where those left untreated took a month to perform the same task.
It’s thought that the drug helps strengthen signals that repair the parts of the brain damaged by stroke.
What the research team from Stanford University hopes is that in humans, it won’t just improve recovery, it’ll enhance it.
However, more research is needed.
“It’s far too early to know what the effect might be on humans,” says one researcher, “and much more work would need to be done to justify a clinical trial which would help us understand what the impact could be on future stroke treatment.”
