Increase in emergency room visits for stroke near Tet
In just under a month, the whole country will celebrate the Lunar New Year of the Dragon 2024. At the end of this year, many medical facilities also began to increase emergency cases for stroke.
Patient NTT (48 years old, residing in District 5, Ho Chi Minh City) was brought to the emergency room by relatives in a state of half-body paralysis and unable to speak. According to the patient’s family, the night before entering the hospital, the patient went to a year-end party. When he returned from drinking, his wife and children saw that Mr. T.’s health was normal, and Mr. T. slept separately.
Treatment of stroke patients at Ho Chi Minh City University of Medicine and Pharmacy Hospital. Photo: BVCC
In the morning, his wife gets up first to take the children to school and go to work. When he returned at noon, Mr. T. was unconscious, paralyzed, and had uncontrollable urination. When I called an ambulance to the hospital, I found out that Mr. T. had had a stroke, past the golden hour for intervention with fibrinolytic drugs. Mr. T.’s wife shared that her husband had high blood pressure but had recently stopped taking his medication.
Stroke is currently the leading cause of death higher than cancer. Meanwhile, during Tet, many stroke patients are taken to the emergency room.
Doctor CKI Dao Duy Khoa – Department of Neurology, University of Medicine and Pharmacy Hospital, Ho Chi Minh City, said that during the Tet season, the number of stroke cases admitted to the hospital increased clearly compared to previous months.
According to doctor Khoa, the reason why strokes increase during Tet season is due to factors such as Tet weather coinciding with the cold season. In the cold season, the stroke rate increases much more than in the hot season. Tet falls in the cold season, so the risk of stroke increases.
Second, during Tet, people change their living habits such as staying up late, going out, and eating and drinking. Many people do not sleep on time, forget to bring medicine, forget to take medicine… This has a negative impact on people with chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension (these diseases are risk factors for stroke). .
Stroke is one of the leading causes of death in the world. Illustration photo: HM
Third, during Tet, people will drink a lot of alcohol and this is also a factor that contributes to increasing the risk of stroke.
Symptoms of a stroke are sudden mouth distortion, slurred speech, and hemiplegia. These symptoms are very simple, but many people are still confused, thinking they are windburned, tired, or have a cold. However, many people still have wrong ways of dealing with stroke emergencies such as: scraping the wind, drawing blood, worshiping, taking oral medicine, waiting for the patient to get better… These are the reasons why the patient cannot receive treatment. provide emergency treatment properly and promptly, causing many unfortunate consequences.
Doctor Khoa also received many patients with signs of paralysis in their arms and legs two or three days ago, but the patients felt that they were normal so they endured it and went to the hospital until their condition got worse. Doctor Khoa believes that the popular habit of “waiting” to see if the condition gets better before going to the hospital causes patients to waste golden time for emergency stroke intervention.
How to prevent stroke?
To prevent the disease, we must find risk factors that easily cause stroke, specifically stroke screening. You can screen for these risk factors, detect it, and treat it early on to prevent stroke. For example, if you have high blood pressure, you need to have regular health checks to see if you have high blood pressure or not. Because there are many people who have high blood pressure but don’t know it, and many years later, when stroke complications occur, they realize they have this “silent killer” disease.
“Stroke has many risk factors. People are divided into 2 groups: Risk factors that cannot be adjusted: age, gender, race,…; Risk factors that can be controlled can be adjusted: high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, smoking, alcohol, etc. Age is an unmodifiable risk factor, the older you are, the greater the risk of stroke,” said Dr. Khoa said.
Also according to Dr. Khoa, factors related to lifestyle, bad habits such as smoking, drinking alcohol, lack of exercise,… are risk factors that can be adjusted. You can change starting today. You should follow a healthy lifestyle for yourself, don’t wait until you get sick to go to the hospital, by then it’s too late. For people with risk factors such as diabetes, dyslipidemia, hypertension… need to control the disease well.
“If you are lucky enough to not have the risk of stroke, you should maintain healthy and scientific living habits and lifestyle, exercise regularly, limit alcohol, quit smoking and get checked.” Regular check-ups every year to prevent this deadly disease,” Dr. Khoa recommended.
