Deans' stroke musings: Prevalence of sleep apnea at the acute phase of ischemic stroke with or without thrombolysis

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Saturday, October 14, 2017

Prevalence of sleep apnea at the acute phase of ischemic stroke with or without thrombolysis

I don't understand the point of this research. Why would thrombolysis have ANY correlation or cause sleep apnea? The hospital never found or even tested for my sleep apnea. I got the fingertip pulse oximetry which is as far as I can tell is barely useful.
https://www.mdlinx.com/internal-medicine/medical-news-article/2017/10/10/sleep-apnea-thrombolysis-stroke/7473125/?rcid=45&inrc=0

Sleep Medicine | October 10, 2017

Huhtakangas JK, et al. - The prevalence, type, and severity of sleep apnea during the acute phase of ischemic stroke was compared among patients either receiving or not receiving thrombolysis. In the vast majority of ischemic stroke patients, sleep apnea was present. The stroke patients treated with thrombolysis were more prone to have sleep apnea, to have elevated National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score at admission, and to be younger. Among those receiving thrombolysis, sleep apnea was more severe as compared to those who were not.

Methods

A total of 246 consecutive adult ischemic stroke patients were enrolled.
During the first 48 hours after the symptom onset of ischemic stroke, patients underwent cardiorespiratory sleep study with portable 3-channel device.

Results

In this study, the authors recruited 110 (65.5% male) stroke patients in the thrombolysis group and 94 (59.6% male) in the nonthrombolysis group.
The median National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score was higher (5.5) in the thrombolysis group compared to the nonthrombolysis group (2.0) (p < 0.001).
In the thrombolysis group, there was a lower incidence of lacunar (17.3% vs 36.2%, p = 0.002) and cerebellar (2.7% vs 16.0%, p < 0.001) strokes and a higher frequency of middle cerebral artery syndrome (60.9% vs 33.0%, p < 0.001) than the nonthrombolysis group.
In 186 (91.2%) patients, sleep apnea defined as an apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) ≥ 5/h was diagnosed, its prevalence being higher in the thrombolysis (96.4%) compared to the nonthrombolysis (85.1%) group (p = 0.007).
In the thrombolysis group, the mean baseline AHI was 33.7/h compared to 26.8/h in the nonthrombolysis group (p = 0.017).