14 DAY TRIAL // Apparently, people with stroke are more likely to die if they are admitted to a hospital on a weekend, suggests a new research carried out by the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada.
For the study, the researchers gathered data from the Canadian Stroke Network on 20,657 patients with acute stroke from 11 stroke centers in Ontario, over a five-year period; they only considered the first stroke a person experienced, of course.
After analyzing the information, the team concluded that people with moderate to severe stroke has as many chances of being admitted to the hospital on weekends and in weekdays, but those with mild stroke were more likely to be admitted on weekdays.
Usually, people admitted on weekends were older, they were more likely to come to the hospital brought by an ambulance and spent a much shorter time from the beginning of stroke symptoms to hospital arrival.
Also, according to statistics, seven days after a stroke, people who had been admitted on weekends had a 8.1% risk of dying, unlike only 7% risk for those admitted on weekdays.
Even after accounting for age, gender, severity of the stroke and other medical conditions and the use of blood clot-busting drugs, the results remained unchanged.
Moira K. Kapral, MD, of the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada said that they “wanted to test whether the severity of strokes on weekends compared to weekdays would account for lower survival rates on the weekends, [and] our results suggest that stroke severity is not necessarily the reason for this discrepancy.”
“Stroke is not the only condition in which lower survival rates have been linked for people admitted to hospitals on the weekends.
“The reason for the differences in rates could be due to hospital staffing, limited access to specialists and procedures done outside of regular hours,” said Kapral, who was with the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Ontario when the research was done.
“More research needs to be done on why the rates are different so that stroke victims can have the best possible chance of surviving.”
Also, there were no differences found in the quality of stroke care, nor in brain scans and admission time between weekends and weekdays.
This new research was supported by the Canadian Stroke Network and it is published in the November 2, 2010, print issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.