By Shari Roan, Los Angeles Times / For the Booster Shots blog
May 10, 2011
Strokes that occur during sleep are not rare.
According to a study released Monday, about one in seven strokes take
place during sleep. That high number raises questions about how to best
help people who have strokes during sleep.
An emergency treatment can greatly reduce the
damage caused by strokes. But the medicine, called tissue plasminogen
activator (tPA), must be given at a hospital within a few hours after
the first symptoms begin. During the day, it's possible to detect the
first signs of a stroke. But people who awaken having had a stroke
during sleep are at a big disadvantage.
According to the new study, studies are needed
to learn ways to identify which people are mostly likely to benefit from
tPA treatment even if their symptoms started during sleep. The study,
of 1,854 people who had ischemic strokes, found that 14% had symptoms
upon awakening. There were few differences between wake-up strokes and
non-wake-up strokes, the authors said. People with wake-up strokes
tended to be slightly older and had more severe strokes. But the
researchers estimated that many of those people with wake-up strokes
could have been treated with tPA.
"This is a group of patients that should be a
focus for future studies," said the lead author of the study, Dr. Jason
Mackey, of the University of Cincinnati, in a news release. "It's likely
that some of these strokes occurred immediately prior to awakening, and
people would benefit from treatment."
The study was published in the journal Neurology.
Related: Blacks suffering a stroke are more likely to call a friend than 911, study finds
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