According to the Missouri Department of Health & Senior Services, stroke is the sixth leading cause of death in Missouri. And when a stroke occurs – minutes matter and blood flow needs to be restored to the brain as quickly as possible.
Dr. Adnan Qureshi with University of Missouri Health Care is an expert on strokes and spoke about how treatment options for strokes have expanded during his time in the field.
Some of the main warning signs of stroke include the abrupt loss of vision and speech, numbness or weakness on one side and sudden confusion.
Missouri Health Talks gathers Missourians’ stories of access to healthcare in their own words.
Dr. Adnan Qureshi: So, I started on this path in the 1990s and this was a time where stroke was considered an untreatable disease.
So, essentially, if you had a stroke – your only chance was recovery through natural means. There was really not much you could do to enhance or increase the chance of recovery.
But it was also a time that there was a hope, there was optimism that treatment will come. We started with intravenous clot busting medication. We advanced to catheter-based techniques. We started with very sophisticated form of imaging the brain and identifying patients who could benefit the most from these therapies.
So, this last 30 years have been a very dynamic time in stroke treatment. So, essentially, in 30 years, stroke went from an untreatable disease to a treatable disease.
What ends up happening in a stroke is that one of the blood vessels that supplies blood to the brain gets blocked by a piece of blood clot, so, essentially, that area of the brain is not getting any blood flow.
Now the brain cannot survive long without blood flow. So, as the minutes and hours go by, the brain actually suffers irreversible damage, and the consequence of which we recognize as stroke.
So, the only way to reverse that is to restore blood flow to the brain as soon as possible.
All the treatment that we have today – the goal is to open the blood vessel and restore blood flow to brain as soon as possible, because this is the best chance of recovery that we can provide.
As we get older, our risk of having a stroke actually increases, but it's also interesting that age can be a false reassuring sign.
Younger individual may just feel that “I am young, so I'm not having a stroke,” and that could be falsely reassuring because young people can also get strokes.
And they are in the most productive years of their life, so obviously, for them to not receive a treatment that could change their life and actually give them back their life and miss out on it is even a greater burden, a greater tragedy.
I think that we have seen that stroke affects a wide range of populations, wide range of ages, and, you know, even we've seen children having strokes.
So, I think that we have to be cautious that the signs of stroke apply to all. You cannot assume that 'I just don't fit the classic persona of a stroke patient.'
So, even though I think the symptoms are stroke or somebody else, but probably, I think, I'm somewhat protected.
