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Case Study: CVA (Stoke)

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

At Davao Medical Center - Medicine ward, we have the highest mortality rate among all wards at the hospital. Mostly we have terminal cases such as cerebrovascular accident (CVA) or commonly known as stroke and the most fatal of them all is the hemorraghic type or CVA bleed and sad to say that some of them die.

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Admitted patients usually have symptoms of paralysis or one sided weakness and sometimes family brought their patients to the hospital with severe symptoms. CVA is usually related to lifestyle behavior. Diets rich in fats, cholesterol, sodium, sugar are one of the factors. Added to that is smoking and lack of exercise. As you can see, this factors bring up hypertension or increased blood pressure. 

What happens kasi is that too much fat and cholesterol may pile up in the blood vessels in the brain. Just imagine a water hose in your garden, if you run the faucet and apply pressure to the hose by clamping it. A pressure builds up in the end of the hose and eventually the hose will burst. The same thing that happens to our blood vessels in the brain, a pressure will build up and booomm! Your brain has bleeding. A blocked vessel may cause oxygen depletion in the brain, also known as brain hypoxia. At 5 minutes of oxygen deprivation, the brain cells could die causing a loss of function to the affected part. 

Most dangerous vessels is the one that connects to the respiratory center of the brain or the medulla oblongata. If its affected, certainly the patients will develop respiratory distress and we intubate the patient or we place a tube on the patients mouth to assist them in breathing and hook them to continous ambubagging or a mechanical ventilator. 

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Posted by marcopolo at 8:27 pm | permalink | comments[6]