Stroke: Introduction

00:01 Hello! Welcome to neuropathology.

00:04 I’d recommend that you have a formal grasp of neuroanatomy before embarking upon our lecture series together here in neuropathology.

00:11 We’ll begin our topic by looking at stroke, the stroke itself in general as we go through the various categories.

00:20 Strokes are a leading cause of death in the US, and the second most common cause of mortality worldwide.

00:26 Now, as we go through stroke, I’m going to give you some differentials, things that you want to keep in mind, as we’ve been doing throughout our entire course.

00:32 Here, you want to be able to differentiate between a stroke versus a transient ischemic attack.

00:39 And the reason for that is because the symptoms that the patient is going to present will be quite similar, won’t they? However, the time course is extremely different.

00:49 We’ll talk about that in a second.

00:51 Now, how did the stroke take place? How is there decrease in blood supply taking place to the brain in which all of a sudden you’ve lost your functioning? Well, if it is transient ischemic attack, well usually now, define it as being stroke-like symptoms but then, the symptoms go away and the patient comes back to being normal.

01:12 For example, a family, husband and wife, sitting in a living room, watching TV, and they’re watching their favorite show, maybe perhaps Full House.

01:22 And all of a sudden, the husband is having a hard time with vision, having a hard time speaking, slurred speech, and really is having a hard time getting out of his recliner.

01:36 The wife gets extremely concerned and so therefore, go to the doctor, and only to come to find out that in a very transient amount of time, maybe less than an hour, all the symptoms go away.

01:48 That’s transient ischemic attack.

01:51 The symptoms are extremely similar to stroke, aren’t they? But it goes away.

01:55 However, what you need to keep in mind is that this is a risk factor for a stroke or impending stroke about to happen.

02:03 And so therefore, you need to quite aggressive with your patient to make sure that if it is a microembolism that is being set off into the circulation of the brain then it has to be treated appropriately.

02:18 The pathophys, now 85% of strokes that do occur are of ischemic nature whereas 15% could be hemorrhagic.

02:28 And therefore, our time and your time should be focused upon ischemic and then, to make sure that we’re complete, I’d give you a proper definition of a hemorrhagic stroke.