Transcript
Announcer:
You’re listening to NeuroFrontiers on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Jay Max Findlay, who’s a Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Alberta. Dr. Findlay will be talking about the long-term impacts of subarachnoid hemorrhage and the importance of rehabilitation. Let’s dive into his insights now.
Dr. Findlay:
Hemorrhages can be of all different degrees of severity. The more severe the hemorrhage, then the poorer the patient's condition at outset. And we call this the subarachnoid hemorrhage grade. So you can be a good grade, whereby you are awake and alert, or a poor grade, which means you're obtunded and have deficits, and everything in between. So the more severe the grade, the poorer the patient's condition at the outset, the more consequences, and the greater rehab that they're going to require in their recovery.
All patients are going to require recovery. But the more deficits, the more recovery. And recovery from a subarachnoid hemorrhage can take months, if not years, to plateau at their best recovery state, often needing a rehab hospital for the poorer-grade patients and physiatry, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy—all kinds of things that are required to get them to their best.
The greatest challenge is recognizing when a patient is worsening from, for example, vasospasm and taking swift action to reverse it. And there are different ways of doing that. We can increase blood pressure and hypertension to force more blood through the spastic vessels. But we also have an endovascular technique—it's called angioplasty—to dilate and open up the arteries that are going into constriction.
So the most intensive care that we supply these patients is in the first three or four weeks following hemorrhage: fixing the aneurysm, making sure that the aneurysm is fully repaired, dealing with hydrocephalus, and then dealing with vasospasm when it occurs.
Beyond that, it really falls into the realm of our rehab doctors, nurses, and therapists and the rehab hospital.
Announcer:
That was Dr. Jay Max Findlay discussing recovery and rehabilitation in subarachnoid hemorrhage. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit NeuroFrontiers on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!
