LI's Southside Hospital debuts stroke unit

Long Island Business News, May 6, 2005 by Claude Solnik

Southside Hospital has opened a stroke center designed to provide swift treatment for stroke victims.

The four-bed unit, which opened March 31 at the Bay Shore hospital, is staffed with nurses and physicians with special training in neurology and stroke management.

The unit is expected to treat about 300 people a year. But the hospital also said it sharpened its expertise in identifying strokes in its emergency and intensive care units.

People need to understand that having a stroke& is as serious an emergency as having a heart attack, said Dr. Steven Rosen, the center's medical director. Through brain and vascular imaging, we can now make accurate diagnoses of what kind of stroke occurred and why it happened. This helps us treat it more effectively.

Strokes are typically caused by blood clots that prevent oxygen from reaching the brain, leading to potential problems such as temporary or permanent paralysis or loss of speech.

If it's caught soon enough, they can usually prevent the onset of a major stroke, said Michael Sacca, a hospital spokesman. That's why they developed a specific unit to deal with it directly.

Rosen said symptoms range from a feeling of weakness on one side to loss or blurry vision and inability to walk or talk.

Patients can often be treated by a medication known as a tissue- type plasminogen activator or t-PA, which can dissolve blood clots and often reverse the damage.

The catch is that they have to be given the drug within three hours of the stroke.

You'd go to the hospital, have your tests to confirm you had a stroke, but the damage was done, Rosen said of care until the mid 1990s when t-PA went into use. That's not necessarily the case today.

Patients in the unit are assessed by rehabilitation specialists within the first 24 hours to help fight any effects of the stroke.