**Evaluate this session**
This session will improve your understanding, awareness, assessment, care and coordination to help provide better outcomes for all victims of cerebrovascular accidents. Methods to identify and triage stroke in the field, the different levels of stroke center certification, and why these are so important will be discussed by Dr. Jason McMullan. He will also discuss the advent and use of “stroke ambulances”.
Wake-up stroke, where a patient awakens with stroke symptoms not present prior to falling asleep, which represents 20% of acute ischemic strokes but patients with these strokes have been excluded from most ischemic stroke treatment trials and are often not eligible for acute reperfusion therapy in clinical practice, leading to poor outcomes. So Polk County (FL) developed a unique approach to assessing and aggressively treating these specific stroke patients and screening them for endovascular reperfusion by bypassing certain local Primary Stroke Centers, and triaging eligible patients to Advanced Stroke Centers.
Incidents of ischemic stroke have increased more than 50% in children from 5 to 14 years old since 1995. Those under 45 years old have seen similar leaps. So victims go undiagnosed due the mindset that they are simply “too young for stroke”. Rommie Duckworth will explain the reasons behind these dramatic numbers, what EMS can do about them and the diagnostic approach that catches what others often miss in newborns and young victims of stroke.