How long does it take to recover from a stroke?

The biggest factors in recovery:  severity of stroke, and amount of therapy

I am frequently asked "Can can you recover from a stroke" and "How long will stroke recovery take?"  The neuroscience shows the brain can heal after injury.  The first thing to remember is that it's a marathon not a sprint.  So it helps for the survivor (and everyone else) to be kind and supportive.  Focus on the day to day effort they put into recovery.  You likely won't see measurable improvement on even a weekly basis.  It's hard to see how recovery happen because it's happening a tiny bit every day. 

Survivors need about 9 hours of intensive practice per week

The research shows that survivors who got about 9 hours per week of intensive therapy made progress with speech therapy.  (My experience is primarily with speech therapy and it's the research I know best).

"Studies that demonstrated a significant treatment effect provided 8.8 hours of therapy per week for 11.2 weeks versus the negative studies that only provided 2 hours per week for 22.9 weeks"

 - research article : Intensity of Aphasia Therapy, Impact on Recovery  by Dr. Teasell, Dr Speechley, et. al. (view research paper)

More challenging practice is more effective

Scientists have discovered something they call Desirable Difficulties. If something is too easy to learn, we don't retain it. It's often desirable for it to be a little difficult to learn.

"Difficult encoding or retrieval is thought to etch in retrieval routes, making the items memorable.  Demonstrations, such as those by Benjamin, Bjork, and Schwartz (1998), in which the items that people answered with the most difficulty were later found to be the most memorable, illustrate this point. "

-Successful Remembering and Successful Forgetting:
A Festschrift in Honor of Robert A. Bjork  p 261.

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