According to the researchers from Loyola University Medical Center, careful care for stroke patients may prevent further neurological damage and minimize common complications.
The author of the study, Dr. Murray Flaster, says that good care can optimize the possibility of the patient’s functional recovery. Doctors and nurses should focus on two main objectives: to minimize the damage to brain tissue and to prevent and treat neurological complications that can occur only after the stroke.
The authors of the study have enlisted a number of important factors that could affect the patient’s recovery process after a stroke and published the results in the MedLink Neurology journal. For example, there is plenty of evidence of a connection between hyperglycemia (increased blood sugar) and adverse outcomes after stroke. The authors recommend strict control of these patients’ blood sugar, as well as aggressive treatment with insulin. The next thing is that each increase in body temperature for at least a degree after stroke makes the risk of death or severe disability more than twice bigger. In such cases, the researchers recommend the use of the so-called therapeutic cooling. The position of the patient in bed is also important, since the sitting position, for example, reduces blood flow to the brain. A common practice is to keep the patient in the supine position for 24 hours.
The authors of the study discuss many other issues in their article related to the treatment of this disease. They include blood pressure control, tracking the data on the volume of blood, statins, treatment of complications, such as pneumonia and sepsis, heart attack, and other heart diseases, blood clots, infections, cerebral edema, hemorrhage, etc.
