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(CNN) – The new coronavirus appears to be causing sudden strokes in adults ages 30 to 40 who are not terribly ill, doctors reported Wednesday. They said patients may not be willing to call 911 because they have heard that hospitals are overwhelmed by coronavirus cases.
There is increasing evidence that covid-19 infection can cause blood to clot unnaturally, and stroke would be an expected consequence of that.
Dr. Thomas Oxley, a neurosurgeon at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York, and his colleagues gave details of five people they treated. All were under the age of 50 and all had mild symptoms of covid-19 infection or no symptoms.
“The virus appears to be causing increased clotting in the large arteries, leading to a severe stroke,” Oxley told CNN.
“Our report shows a sevenfold increase in the incidence of sudden stroke in young patients in the past two weeks. Most of these patients have no medical history and were at home with mild symptoms (or in two cases, no symptoms) of covid, “he added.
“Everyone tested positive. Two of them were slow to call an ambulance.
It is not common for people as young to have strokes, especially strokes in the great vessels.
“For comparison, our service, in the last 12 months, has treated an average of 0.73 patients every 2 weeks under the age of 50 with large vessel stroke,” the team wrote in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine. That is less than two people a month.
A stroke in a large blood vessel causes serious damage if it is not removed immediately. At least one patient is deceased and others are in rehabilitation centers, intensive care or in the stroke unit. Only one went home, but it will require intensive care, Oxley said.
Oxley said her team wanted to tell people to monitor themselves for symptoms of coronavirus infection and to call 911 if they have any evidence of stroke. “Until now, people have been advised to only call an ambulance with difficulty breathing or high fever,” he wrote.
The easy memory device for stroke, he said, is FAST (“RAPID” in Spanish): F for facial paralysis (face), A for arm weakness (arm), S for speech difficulty (speach), and T for the time (time) to call 911.
“The most effective treatment for large vessel stroke is clot recovery, but this should be done within 6 hours, and sometimes within 24 hours,” Oxley wrote.
