Will no one think of the stroke survivors and actually do something to help them?
This solution maybe from May, 2016.
Stroke victims' new saviour...magnetic blood: Pioneering research could transform treatment of killer condition
Or maybe this solution from March, 2015
Magnetic nanoparticles could stop blood clot-caused strokes
Beware of wake-up stroke
Thomas (50) (name changed) remembers the panic he felt
that morning when he woke up and discovered that something was seriously
wrong.
He could not move from the bed because the
entire right side of his body was weak. He tried to wake up his wife by
calling her but all he could manage was some garbled words.
It
was after 8 a.m., when he was rushed to the emergency wing of Sree
Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, where he
was immediately rushed in for MRI imaging studies.
“He
had presented with what is known as the “wake-up stroke,” wherein a
patient awakens with symptoms of a stroke which were not there when he
fell asleep.
Imaging studies showed that the brain had suffered only minimal damage and that there was a huge salvageable brain area.
There
was a major clot in the main cerebral artery, which we removed using
mechanical thrombectomy (removing clot using a device called Solitaire).
He
made good recovery and walked out of the hospital,” says P.N. Sylaja,
Professor of Neurology, SCTIMST. Approximately 25 per cent of ischemic
strokes (strokes which are caused by a blood clot in the brain arteries)
are wake-up strokes, wherein patients who go to sleep normally, wake up
with stroke symptoms
Intravenous thrombolysis using a
recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rtPA) or clot-busting drug
can improve the clinical outcomes of patients with acute ischemic stroke
if it is administered within the first 4.5 hours of the stroke onset
The
time of the onset of stroke is the key factor on which safe therapeutic
decisions are based. Wake-up strokes present a therapeutic dilemma for
neurologists because the time of the onset of stroke is unknown. Many
patients with wake-up strokes thus suffer from poor outcomes because
they are not taken to be candidates for tPA as it can only be delivered
within the specified time window.
Delay in treatment
has always been a problem in wake-up strokes because often the family
might be late in discovering that the person has suffered a stroke and
there might be multiple reasons for delays in reaching the hospital too.
“Many
recent studies on wake-up strokes however show that most of these
strokes actually happen in the morning hours and that the stroke itself
may be what woke them up.
So these days, such
patients are subjected to advanced CT/MRI Perfusion studies, which can
tell us how much of the brain has suffered irreversible damage and how
much can be salvaged and if thrombolysis can help him,” Dr. Sylaja says.
Perfusion
studies can clearly indicate if significant time delay has occurred
after the onset of stroke nad if the patient will benefit from
thrombolysis
Wake-up strokes are currently an
important area of discussion with large randomised controlled clinical
trials happening world over on how best to treat wake-up strokes and the
efficacy of IV thrombolysis and endovascular mechanical thrombectomy
options.
The patho physiology of wake-up strokes
phenomenon is not fully understood and is linked to a combination of
bodily changes in the circadian cycle, such as adrenalin secretion,
platelet aggregation (leading to clots) or the normal surge in one’s
blood pressure, all seen in the early morning hours.
Reporting by
C. Maya
Time of the onset of stroke is the key factor on which safe therapeutic decisions are based
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