1st year of COVID-19 pandemic saw fewer Alberta stroke patients, more deaths: study - Global News | Canada News Media
Connect with us

Health

1st year of COVID-19 pandemic saw fewer Alberta stroke patients, more deaths: study – Global News

Published

 on


The first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Alberta saw fewer stroke patients, but a higher number of stroke-related deaths, according to new research.

The study, published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, was conducted by a team of eight doctors and other researchers across the province.

“One of the things that we began to realize within the first few months of the pandemic, is that there seemed to be a decline in the number of people presenting with acute strokes,” lead author Dr. Aravind Ganesh, a neurologist at the University of Calgary, said in an interview.

Several countries, he said, had started noticing a trend of fewer people seeking emergency care for a variety of medical issues during the pandemic.

“The question that people started asking was whether the public health restrictions that we had implemented as a result of the pandemic might be having some unintended consequences of dissuading people from attending at the hospital for emergencies like stroke and heart disease,” said Ganesh.

“So, the premise for this study came from this very legitimate worry on our part.”

Researchers looked at data for 19,531 Alberta patients from January 2016 to February 2020 and another 4,900 patients during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“In the first wave of the pandemic in Alberta, we had quite a decline in the number of people who were presenting with acute ischemic stroke — that’s strokes because of blood clots in the brain,” explained Ganesh.

“Along with that, we also found the that the use of stroke therapies declined by about the same amount.”

Researchers also found that the number of patients with stroke symptoms did not return to pre-pandemic levels after the first wave in spring 2020.

“Especially during the second- and third-wave periods of our study, when COVID-19 cases surged, we expected to observe an increase in stroke presentations instead of declines,” they write in the study.

Ganesh said he and other researchers were able to look at what happened to those patients by studying how many people died due to strokes.

“We found those out-of-hospital deaths ended up rising four out of the five time periods in the pandemic,” he said. “We ended up being able to find some of these missing strokes that way.”

Similar results were found in hospitals.

“During the second wave of the pandemic and the third wave of the pandemic, more people ended up dying in hospital who had strokes,” he said.

READ MORE: Survey outlines COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on heart disease, stroke

The study looked at population-level data, so it’s not clear why people decided not to seek treatment.

“Is it that people were waiting to seek help until their strokes became more severe?” he asked.

Ganesh said researchers don’t know for sure, but they believe people were trying to avoid hospitals.

“We suspect it was hospital avoidance because of the out-of-hospital deaths that we found.”

He said the results of the research weren’t all bad.

“We actually did end up catching up later on in the pandemic,” said Ganesh.

He said public health officials and doctors also worked to remind people to go to the hospital for emergencies.

“What we’ve understood is that we really need to think critically about the kind of public health messaging we do during the pandemic.”

© 2022 The Canadian Press

Adblock test (Why?)



Source link

Continue Reading

Health

Whooping cough is at a decade-high level in US

Published

 on

 

MILWAUKEE (AP) — Whooping cough is at its highest level in a decade for this time of year, U.S. health officials reported Thursday.

There have been 18,506 cases of whooping cough reported so far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That’s the most at this point in the year since 2014, when cases topped 21,800.

The increase is not unexpected — whooping cough peaks every three to five years, health experts said. And the numbers indicate a return to levels before the coronavirus pandemic, when whooping cough and other contagious illnesses plummeted.

Still, the tally has some state health officials concerned, including those in Wisconsin, where there have been about 1,000 cases so far this year, compared to a total of 51 last year.

Nationwide, CDC has reported that kindergarten vaccination rates dipped last year and vaccine exemptions are at an all-time high. Thursday, it released state figures, showing that about 86% of kindergartners in Wisconsin got the whooping cough vaccine, compared to more than 92% nationally.

Whooping cough, also called pertussis, usually starts out like a cold, with a runny nose and other common symptoms, before turning into a prolonged cough. It is treated with antibiotics. Whooping cough used to be very common until a vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, which is now part of routine childhood vaccinations. It is in a shot along with tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. The combo shot is recommended for adults every 10 years.

“They used to call it the 100-day cough because it literally lasts for 100 days,” said Joyce Knestrick, a family nurse practitioner in Wheeling, West Virginia.

Whooping cough is usually seen mostly in infants and young children, who can develop serious complications. That’s why the vaccine is recommended during pregnancy, to pass along protection to the newborn, and for those who spend a lot of time with infants.

But public health workers say outbreaks this year are hitting older kids and teens. In Pennsylvania, most outbreaks have been in middle school, high school and college settings, an official said. Nearly all the cases in Douglas County, Nebraska, are schoolkids and teens, said Justin Frederick, deputy director of the health department.

That includes his own teenage daughter.

“It’s a horrible disease. She still wakes up — after being treated with her antibiotics — in a panic because she’s coughing so much she can’t breathe,” he said.

It’s important to get tested and treated with antibiotics early, said Dr. Kris Bryant, who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases at Norton Children’s in Louisville, Kentucky. People exposed to the bacteria can also take antibiotics to stop the spread.

“Pertussis is worth preventing,” Bryant said. “The good news is that we have safe and effective vaccines.”

___

AP data journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Source link

Continue Reading

Health

Scientists show how sperm and egg come together like a key in a lock

Published

 on

 

How a sperm and egg fuse together has long been a mystery.

New research by scientists in Austria provides tantalizing clues, showing fertilization works like a lock and key across the animal kingdom, from fish to people.

“We discovered this mechanism that’s really fundamental across all vertebrates as far as we can tell,” said co-author Andrea Pauli at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.

The team found that three proteins on the sperm join to form a sort of key that unlocks the egg, allowing the sperm to attach. Their findings, drawn from studies in zebrafish, mice, and human cells, show how this process has persisted over millions of years of evolution. Results were published Thursday in the journal Cell.

Scientists had previously known about two proteins, one on the surface of the sperm and another on the egg’s membrane. Working with international collaborators, Pauli’s lab used Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence tool AlphaFold — whose developers were awarded a Nobel Prize earlier this month — to help them identify a new protein that allows the first molecular connection between sperm and egg. They also demonstrated how it functions in living things.

It wasn’t previously known how the proteins “worked together as a team in order to allow sperm and egg to recognize each other,” Pauli said.

Scientists still don’t know how the sperm actually gets inside the egg after it attaches and hope to delve into that next.

Eventually, Pauli said, such work could help other scientists understand infertility better or develop new birth control methods.

The work provides targets for the development of male contraceptives in particular, said David Greenstein, a genetics and cell biology expert at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study.

The latest study “also underscores the importance of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry,” he said in an email.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Source link

Continue Reading

Health

Turn Your Wife Into Your Personal Sex Kitten

Published

 on

Product Name: Turn Your Wife Into Your Personal Sex Kitten

All orders are protected by SSL encryption – the highest industry standard for online security from trusted vendors.

Turn Your Wife Into Your Personal Sex Kitten is backed with a 60 Day No Questions Asked Money Back Guarantee. If within the first 60 days of receipt you are not satisfied with Wake Up Lean™, you can request a refund by sending an email to the address given inside the product and we will immediately refund your entire purchase price, with no questions asked.

(more…)

Continue Reading

Trending

Exit mobile version