It seemed like just a simple seizure when little Alexzandra Gonzales suddenly twitched and then slumped down, breathing weakly. After a frantic rush to the hospital, Gonzales’ parents could hardly believe their ears when they learned that their daughter had suffered a stroke just days before her first birthday.
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Little Alexzandra Gonzales and her mother after treatment for stroke |
“We never thought that children could have strokes too,” said Gonzales’ mother, Amanda Gonzales, with a heavy heart. This is a common misconception, while in reality, several thousand children in the United States suffer strokes each year. Experts are increasingly concerned that this condition is on the rise. Approximately 10-25% of children who have strokes will die.
Strokes are very rare in children, yet Dr. John Lynch from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) estimates that about 1,000 newborns experience this condition each year, along with around 3,000-5,000 children under 18 months old. The age difference is significant because strokes in newborns differ from those in older children in that they have a very high risk of brain damage.
Some experts believe that most children who survive strokes can recover quickly, as their brains are more “plastic” than those of adults. However, recent studies indicate that more than half of the recovery cases will suffer from permanent disabilities in movement and cognition.
So far, there have been very few studies on how to treat strokes in young children. Treatments designed for adults are still applied, despite the knowledge that the causes of strokes in adults, such as blood clots or arteriosclerosis, are not the culprits in children.
Currently, over two-thirds of stroke cases in children have unknown causes, although congenital heart defects, vascular incidents, and certain infectious diseases are believed to trigger strokes in children. NIH studies further suggest that the causes may be related to genetic mutations affecting blood clot formation and metabolic processes.
In the case of little Alexzandra Gonzales, just three days after being hospitalized, she suffered another stroke on her birthday. Surgeons had to remove a part of her skull to accommodate the swelling brain. A week after waking up, this one-year-old seemed as if she had just been born, unable to perform any actions, even lifting her head. The doctors are unclear about the cause of Alexzandra’s stroke, but she was fortunate to reach the hospital in time. In many cases, parents fail to recognize the dangerous signs of acute stroke symptoms such as weakness on one side, inability to articulate words, and notably, seizures.
According to Dr. Raymond Pitetti from Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital, only by early detection of stroke symptoms in young children and timely treatment is there any chance of saving the brain.
Mỹ Linh
