Time Is Brain: Why Aren’t Mobile Stroke Units Everywhere? | Dr. May Nour

Now talking about specialty, can you first outline to us what is a stroke and who do they impact? And I especially want to talk about that because I think we have our own vision stereotypes when and how a stroke is actually going to impact us.

Yeah.

So stroke can come in two different types.

Stroke is basically dysfunction or death of brain tissue.

And I like to say that the brain is like real estate.

It's all about location, location, location.

There could be very tiny, eloquent areas of the brain that cause grave dysfunction if they're disabled, or there could be very large areas of the brain that are pretty mute and don't do a lot if they have dysfunction.

So it's really about what happens and where it happens.

And the dysfunction in the brain can happen because of lack of blood flow to the tissue of the brain.

That's the majority of stroke.

So 87% of stroke are ischemic in nature where there's lack of blood flow.

If there's a blood clot that blocks the tissue of the brain, a flow to the tissue of the brain, then that tissue dies.

The second kind of stroke, and that's about 13% of stroke, is hemorrhagic stroke where there's bleeding into the tissue of the brain.

And that also causes the cells to die and cause dysfunction.

And stroke disproportionately affects older patients than younger patients.

So the majority of stroke actually happens over the age of 65.

However, stroke can happen at any age.

That's something I really, really want to underscore here.

Stroke can happen to a child.

Stroke can happen to a young adult.

Stroke can happen to older adults.

And that's because there are so many mechanisms for which clotting can happen or bleeding can happen.

It can be something congenital, like we have a bleeding disorder.

It could be something like our blood is too sticky and have clots.

It could be something like even mechanical damage.