Young and middle-aged people, barely sick with covid-19, are dying from strokes

[BeckyDem]

Doctors sound alarm about patients in their 30s and 40s left debilitated or dead. Some didn’t even know they were infected.

By
Ariana Eunjung Cha

April 24, 2020 at 6:36 p.m. EDT

Thomas Oxley wasn’t even on call the day he received the page to come to Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan. There weren’t enough doctors to treat all the emergency stroke patients, and he was needed in the operating room.

The patient’s chart appeared unremarkable at first glance. He took no medications and had no history of chronic conditions. He had been feeling fine, hanging out at home during the lockdown like the rest of the country, when suddenly, he had trouble talking and moving the right side of his body. Imaging showed a large blockage on the left side of his head.

Oxley gasped when he got to the patient’s age and covid-19 status: 44, positive.

The man was among several recent stroke patients in their 30s to 40s who were all infected with the coronavirus. The median age for that type of severe stroke is 74.

As Oxley, an interventional neurologist, began the procedure to remove the clot, he observed something he had never seen before. On the monitors, the brain typically shows up as a tangle of black squiggles — “like a can of spaghetti,” he said — that provide a map of blood vessels. A clot shows up as a blank spot. As he used a needlelike device to pull out the clot, he saw new clots forming in real-time around it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/24/strokes-coronavirus-young-patients/




Yea, we should definitely open up the economy, nothing to worry about out there!

[empedocles]

1. 'clots forming in real time' - wow

[BeckyDem]

2. I know, that blew me away too.

[sop]

3. This reads like something from a Hollywood script for an overly-melodramatic pandemic movie.

[BeckyDem]

4. Yep.

[M0rpheus]

5. We're now in Andromeda Strain territory. n/t

[dalton99a]

7. Kick

Oxley, the interventional neurologist, said one striking aspect of the cases is how long many waited before seeking emergency care.

The 33-year-old woman was previously healthy but had a cough and headache for about a week. Over the course of 28 hours, she noticed her speech was slurred and that she was going numb and weak on her left side but, the researchers wrote, “delayed seeking emergency care due to fear of the covid-19 outbreak.”

It turned out she was already infected.

By the time she arrived at the hospital, a CT scan showed she had two clots in her brain and patchy “ground glass” in her lungs — the opacity in CT scans that is a hallmark of covid-19 infection. She was given two different types of therapy to try to break up the clots and by Day 10, she was well enough to be discharged.

Oxley said the most important thing for people to understand is that large strokes are very treatable. Doctors are often able to reopen blocked blood vessels through techniques such as pulling out clots or inserting stents. But it has to be done quickly, ideally within six hours, but no longer than 24 hours: “The message we are trying to get out is if you have symptoms of stroke, you need to call the ambulance urgently. ”

As for the 44-year-old man Oxley was treating, doctors were able to remove the large clot that day in late March, but the patient is still struggling. As of this week, a little over a month after he arrived in the emergency room, he is still hospitalized.

[BeckyDem]

8. It is terrifying to learn the extent of damage this virus can do.

But at least we know and therefore no opening up anywhere in the U.S. is the way to go. But we have sociopaths in the WH and governors. When I saw video of all the people congregated closely at the beaches I gasped at the stupidity.