SCH stroke therapies can be fun and games

“ Hug.”
One simple word, uttered by Paul Hasenwinkel, was cause for celebration (and big hugs) in a Stroke Club meeting at Swedish Covenant Hospital held earlier this year.

As a result of a stroke, Hasenwinkel, a patient in SCH’s monthly Stroke Club, lives with expressive aphasia and apraxia of speech, disorders which make finding words and speech difficult. For this reason, just retrieving and expressing the word “hug” was a breakthrough for him. It was also a breakthrough for Leigh Cohen, a speech therapist in Outpatient Rehabilitation and coordinator of the Stroke Club, as she researches new, innovative ways to help stroke patients regain cognitive and linguistic abilities.

One technique Cohen and Julie Torrence, an occupational therapist at SCH, have been exploring over the past six months is the use of brain games, teasers and puzzles to challenge the 15 to 20 stroke patients who attend the club.

Cohen explained that she has seen first-hand that games can sometimes create new pathways in the brain that allow people to achieve progress they never thought possible, improve their cognitive processing speed and increase their attention span.

Hasenwinkel was observing a presentation on a word game when he made his breakthrough. Cohen explained that because of his expressive aphasia, if you were to ask him to just say “hug,” he may struggle with it, but since he was responding to a word challenge, it activated a different part of his brain and he was able to speak.  

The word game, and nearly a dozen other puzzles and board games which have the potential to exercise patient’s brains, were generously donated to Outpatient Rehabilitation by J. Pine, manager of Marbles: The Brain Store in Lincoln Square.

Pine personally presented each game to the Stroke Club participants and explained that different games challenge different aspects of thinking, including memory, coordination, critical thinking, visual perception and word skills.  Therefore, patients can use games which specifically target the areas in which they need rehabilitation.

In the future, Cohen looks forward to more happy breakthroughs using this innovative therapy and hopes to partner with Marbles to develop a study comparing the success of traditional stroke therapies to therapeutic, non-traditional methods, like the mind games.

SCH offers patients, visitors and hospital employees many services and programs focused on stroke, including stroke awareness, prevention, emergency treatment and rehabilitation. For more information on these programs, visit SCH’s stroke awareness web page by clicking here.  

For more information about the SCH Stroke Club, contact Leigh Cohen at lcohen@SwedishCovenant.org and/or ext. 3167.
For more information on Marbles: The Brain Store, visit MarblesTheBrainStore.com.