Exploring the Inclusion of Person-Centered Care Domains in Stroke Transitions of Care Interventions: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association.

Background: Health care teams along the stroke recovery continuum have a responsibility to support care transitions and return to the community. Ideally, individualized care will consider patient and family preferences, best available evidence, and health care professional input. Person-centered care can improve patient-practitioner interactions through shared decision-making in which health professionals and institutions are sensitive to those for whom they provide care.

Ideal Foundational Requirements for Stroke Program Development and Growth: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association.

Stroke center certification has evolved at a rapid pace and is now available at 4 different levels of service in the United States. Although certification standards provide guidance on stroke center process elements, lack of guidance on structural components such as workforce, staffing, and unit operations has resulted in heterogeneous services among hospitals credentialed at the same stroke center level. Such heterogeneity challenges public expectations and transparency about actual service capabilities within American stroke centers and in some cases may foster leniency in credentialing agency certification methods.

Pennsylvania comprehensive stroke center collaborative: Statement on the recently updated IV rt-PA prescriber information for acute ischemic stroke.

Objective: Recently, the FDA guidelines regarding the eligibility of patients with acute ischemic stroke to receive IV rt-PA have been modified and are not in complete accord with the latest AHA/ASA guidelines. The resultant differences may result in discrepancies in patient selection for intravenous thrombolysis.

Methods: Several comprehensive stroke centers in the state of Pennsylvania have undertaken a collaborative effort to clarify and unify our own recommendations regarding how to reconcile these different guidelines.

Caring for Patients Treated With Therapeutic Hypothermia.

Numerous studies have indicated that therapeutic hypothermia can improve neurological outcomes after cardiac arrest. This treatment has redefined care after resuscitation and offers an aggressive intervention that may mitigate postresuscitation syndrome. Caregivers at Lehigh Valley Health Network, Allentown, Pennsylvania, an academic, community Magnet hospital, treated more than 200 patients with therapeutic hypothermia during an 8-year period.

Therapeutic medical hypothermia--a multispecialty approach.

Cardiac arrest remains one of the most common causes of death in developed countries. Those who survive may have significant neurologic morbidity. In the current decade, therapeutic medical hypothermia (TMH) has emerged as the only treatment that unequivocally improves neurologic outcomes in post ventricular fibrillation / ventricular tachycardia induced cardiac arrest.

Strokes after cardiac surgery and relationship to carotid stenosis.

Objective: To critically examine the role of significant carotid stenosis in the pathogenesis of postoperative stroke following cardiac operations.

Design: Retrospective cohort study.

Setting: Single tertiary care hospital.

Predicting mortality after intracerebral hemorrhage: comparison of scoring systems and influence of withdrawal of care.

Objective: The Broderick system and the intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) score are two systems for predicting 30-day mortality in patients with spontaneous ICH. No previous study has compared two ICH scoring systems in an independent patient cohort. Our purpose was to externally validate and directly compare these two systems and evaluate the effect of withdrawal of care on system performance.