BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (Ivanhoe Newswire) – Stroke is the third leading cause of death, as well as the leading cause of serious disability among adults. Strokes are unbiased; they can touch anyone at any time, regardless of age, race, or gender; which means children can also be affected.
“The incidence of stroke in childhood is about five per 100,000 in the United States each year,” said Heather Fullerton, M.D., the study’s principal investigator and director of the Pediatric Stroke and Cerebrovascular Disease Center at the University of California in San Francisco. Fullerton and her colleagues conducted the first study that established the relationship between infection and stroke in children.
Researchers analyzed diagnostic and radiologic databases of children enrolled in the Kaiser Permanente healthcare plan from 1993 to 2007. They evaluated medical records and chart reviews for infections during the two years prior to the childhood stroke, and the same time period for the age-matched controls.
The children with stroke ranged from infants to adolescents. The average age was ten and a half—the oldest child was 19. Researchers identified three stroke-free controls per case. Findings between girls and boys or ethnic groups didn't differ.
In a review of 2.5 million children, the researchers identified 126 childhood ischemic stroke cases and then randomly selected 378 age-matched controls from the remaining children without stroke. They discovered that 29 percent of those who suffered a stroke had a medical encounter for infection in the two days preceding the stroke versus one percent of controls during the same dates.
They also discovered that most of the previously healthy children with an ischemic stroke had a disease of the blood vessels to the brain, and these children were at a much higher risk of having a recurrent stroke.
Fullerton and her team believe that this study may provide some insight into why children develop this arteriopathy: the inflammatory process that results from an infection which may lead to stroke by causing vascular injury, researchers said.
The standard treatment for ischemic stroke in children is blood thinners. But the study suggests that future research should focus on the potential role for anti-inflammatory medications in preventing the recurrence of stroke in this population.
"Childhood infections are exceedingly common, while childhood strokes are uncommon," Fullerton was quoted as saying. "Parents should not be alarmed at the findings of this study. We suspect that there are rare genetic factors that may place some children at risk for this uncommon effect of common infections."
SOURCE: American Heart Association, February, 2012
