Hospitals urge stroke victims to get treatment

Doctors say coronavirus has kept some from seeking help

NEW HAVEN — Connecticut’s leading hospitals are concerned about an alarming 39 percent drop in the number of stroke victims seeking immediate medical help, for fear of contracting the coronavirus.

“To see patients not come in is very disheartening and very scary for us,” said Dr. Kevin Sheth, chief of neurocritical care and emergency neurology at Yale New Haven Hospital. “It’s very alarming because stroke is the leading cause of disability in the country.”

The stark drop in the normal volume of stroke patients is being seen not only at Yale New Haven Health, which runs hospitals in Bridgeport and Greenwich, but also at Danbury and Norwalk hospitals, run by Nuvance Health.

“It saddens us that people get paralyzed by a stroke, and they wait to see if their symptoms go away,” said Dr. Paul Wright, assistant vice president of neurosciences at Nuvance Health. “We’ve enacted strict policies about how patients are assessed and treated so (stroke) patients don’t have to incur risk by coming to the hospital.”

The danger is not only that debilitations set in if someone who suffers a stroke doesn’t go the hospital immediately, but that a stroke victim who doesn’t get treatment could suffer a more serious stroke, physicians said.

Stroke is the fifth leading cause of death in the United States, killing about 140,000 Americans each year, according to government figures. A stroke happens when blood is cut off from the brain, producing numbness, speech confusion, loss of coordination, and other symptoms.

The good news is that stroke is most treatable within the first 24 hours of symptoms.

“We have had patients with devastating strokes go home in a day or two as good as normal,” Nuvance’s Wright said.

But Connecticut has been far from normal since early March, when the first case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Danbury subjected life to quarantines, face masks and 6-foot distances in public.

Although hospitals cleared the deck for COVID-19 patients, emergency rooms remained open to treat people with heart attacks, strokes and other serious non-coronavirus conditions.

Nonetheless, the public perception took hold that hospitals were only dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, physicians here say.

The same perception is prevalent across the country, according to a study of 850 hospitals published earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study of 230,000 patients in 49 states found the volume of people arriving at hospitals with stroke signs dropped 39 percent between March 26 and April 8. That two-week period was marked by patients’ “reluctance to seek care out of fear that they might contract COVID-19, and the effects of social distancing,” wrote the study’s lead author Dr. Akash Kansagra, an assistant professor of radiology at Washington University’s Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology.

“There’s no reason to believe people suddenly stopped having strokes,” Kansagra wrote. “Even patients with really severe strokes are seeking care at reduced rates.”

The concerning trend comes at a time of uncertainty in Connecticut and other nearby states that are launching the first phase of reopening life to the new normal.

On the one hand, COVID-19 hospitalizations continue to decline — an indication that the worst of the coronavirus outbreak is behind Connecticut. On the other hand, the highly contagious virus continues to ravage the frail and elderly in Connecticut nursing homes.

Last week, Nuvance began performing elective surgery again at its New York hospitals, and planned to do the same in Danbury and Norwalk by the end of the month. Other major hospitals such as St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford started performing elective surgery last week.

As the public sees surgeons returning to work, hospitals hope more people take their stroke symptoms seriously and get themselves to the emergency room.

“Hopefully with elective surgery returning, people won’t think that the hospital is a COVID center,” Wright said.