BS RAWAT
NEW DELHI: A team of specialists at the Columbia Asia Hospital, Delhi, successfully helped a stroke patient recover within a few hours. However, they applauded the family of the patient who managed to bring him to the emergency services department within three hours of the stroke, said a hospital release.

A 48-year-old patient was brought to the hospital after an acute stroke. The event affected his ability to talk and he had a dense hemiplegia (paralysis or weakness on the upper and lower limbs) at the right side of the body as an impact of the stroke.

“As soon as the patient was brought in, we performed an MRI that showed a small infarction in the middle cerebral artery (MCA). It also showed formation of a blood clot, known as a thrombus, in M1 which affected the blood supply, said Dr.Yadav Munde, Interventional Radiologist, Columbia Asia Hospital.

Since patient came to us within 6 hrs, we removed the blood clot through thrombectomy and the patient started showing improvement right away,” Dr Munde stated.

Experts say that in case of a stroke, ‘time lost is brain lost’ – a stroke causes the brain lose as many neurons as it does in almost 3.6 years of normal aging for each hour of delay in treatment.

“Since the person was brought in time, we could give him a more effective treatment. We are very happy that the patient is recuperating well within such a short span of time and did not experience any intracranial (within the skull) bleeding,” says Dr Bhushan Joshi, Neurologist, Columbia Asia Hospital.

“Such patients need treatment by multidisciplinary team of doctors such as Neurologist, Interventional Radiologist, Neurosurgeon with good critical care backup; and all this is in place in our hospital” said Dr Viju Rajan, CEO, Columbia Asia Hospital.