Speaker 1: Time now to answer some common health questions. Joining me is News Channel 5’s medical expert, Dr. Soria. He is a Chief of Emergency Medicine at Wellington Regional Medical Center. As always, we look forward to seeing you ever Wednesday. We kind of talked about this behind the scenes, but our topic today is stroke. So first question, what is the difference between a warning stroke and a silent stroke?
Dr. David Soria: Making it real simple, symptoms. A silent stroke is an incidental finding, you actually see that on CAT scan when you’re looking for something else. You see that area where there actually has been a stroke, but the patient doesn’t reveal any symptoms in present or in the past. Believe it or not, up to 10% or more of patients greater than 69 have experienced that. It’s a very interesting thing. A warning stroke, or a mini-stroke, is a little bit different. That is when you do have symptoms. You do have numbness in the right arm, left arm, weakness, slurred speech and that, then, resolves within minutes, no more than hours, and it lasts up to 24 hours. A little bit different.
Speaker 1: I didn’t realize it could last that long.
Dr. David Soria: Yeah, that’s the definition of a mini-stroke. Either one, whether you have a silent stroke or whether you have a mini-stroke, either one is considered, you should know, you have cerebral vascular disease and you absolutely need to talk about that with your doctor, because you’re going to need preventative therapy. The key here is preventing the big one.
Speaker 1: All right. If you are angry, are you more likely to have a stroke?
Dr. David Soria: You know what?
Speaker 1: Is there a correlation there?
Dr. David Soria: It’s another reason why, if you have a little bit of a hot temper, you need to get some anger management. There actually has been a recent study that showed that if you do have significant or severe outbursts of anger, you, in the next two hours, are much more likely to have a cardiovascular event. As a matter of fact, it showed that if you had an anger outburst on a regular basis, that after that period of time, you are five times more likely to have a heart attack.
Speaker 1: Which is really interesting, because so many people think it’s stress, and it is, but also anger now. Throw that in the mix.
Dr. David Soria: That’s a good point that you bring up. Anger is a form of stress. Basically, it does the same type of thing. What it does is it increases your blood pressure, increases your heart rate, increases your stress hormones, which in turn can cause vasoconstriction and decrease the amount of oxygen that is getting to your blood and to your brain.
Speaker 1: So it’s all connected.
Dr. David Soria: That can absolutely cause a problem.
Speaker 1: All right, wow. Dr. Soria, good input.
Dr. David Soria: Chill out, is the lesson.
Speaker 1: Chill out. If you have a question for the doctor, you can send it in by going to our website, WPTV.com, be sure to click on the health link. The scroll down, and then you will see a form to write your question. Thanks so much for coming in, we’ll see you again next week.
Dr. David Soria: You’re welcome.
Speaker 1: Next week?
Dr. David Soria: Next week.
Speaker 1: All right, sounds like a plan.