Case Study-1
Ms. ‘A’, 32 years, works in a multi-national company. Her working hours are not fixed. She even has to attend meetings at 2 AM with the foreign delegates. She is young, she never even thought of slowing down. One night, while attending a Skype video conference, suddenly she felt that her speech was becoming disoriented. She bailed out of the conference and discovered she could not see with her left eye. She was very scared and called her doctor. At the advice of a doctor, she went through some tests and it revealed her having very high cholesterol and blood sugar. She went to the hospital with these reports; her attending specialist doctor advised a CT scan and not to the doctor’s surprise, evidence of stroke was revealed.
Case Study-2
Mr ‘X’, 35 years old, had a good night’s sleep, woke up at 7 in the morning. On his way to the bathroom, suddenly he fell down. His wife rushed to him and put him to bed. After a few moments, he assured he was feeling all right and there was no need to call a doctor. He blamed it on the previous night’s heavy dinner and went on with his day.
Days went by. Then, one day, Mr ‘X’ fell down again, this time in the bus while returning from work. His colleagues took him to the nearest hospital. When he woke up, he found that he could not move the right side of his body including his hand and leg. Attending doctor asked him about a similar incident happening before as he nodded, the doctor replied, “You had an initial attack of stroke back then and this time it’s the stroke that caused your paralysis. You should not have underestimated your fall.”
Upon reading the case studies, one thing must have been clear to the readers that ‘Stroke’ is one of the most devastating ‘Silent Killer’. Now in Bangladesh it is the leading cause of death. Every year 178,000 people die due to stoke in our country.
Stroke maims people in various ways if it doesn’t kill, and the number of people with disability due to strokes are rising every day. If you think stroke is something happening just to the elderly, it's high time to throw away this conception. The numbers of attacks of stroke in people aging 25-45 years old are increasing dramatically. For young adults the stroke attacks are more heartbreaking as the paralysis is inevitable in 90% cases. It’s really intolerable for a person of that age to become paralysed.
What happens in a stroke? When there is bleeding inside the brain (from the blood vessels of the brain) or loss of blood supply in the brain (due to occlusion of vessels), stroke occurs. When it occurs in the left part of the brain, the right side of the body becomes paralysed, along with visual impairment and headaches.
Some causes of stroke in young adults are:
- Cardiac abnormalities
- Obesity
- Undiagnosed or uncontrolled Diabetes
- High cholesterol level in blood (dependence on junk foods)
- Migraine
- Smoking and excessive alcohol intake
- Hypertension
- Altering blood pressures due to stress
- Lack of exercise
Stroke in young people means a lifetime of recovery and a loss of many productive years. So, time to get aware, time to throw away bad habits, time to get rid of the risk factors.
Stay Healthy!!