You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
PostScript
Stroke in the puerperium treated with intra-arterial rt-PA
  1. Ole Morten Rønning1,
  2. Arve Dahl2,
  3. Søren Jacob Bakke3,
  4. Amjad Iqbal Hussain4,
  5. Ellen Deilkås1
  1. 1Department of Neurology, Akershus University Hospital, Lørenskog, Norway
  2. 2Department of Neurology, The National Hospital, Oslo, Norway
  3. 3Department of Radiology, The National Hospital, Oslo, Norway
  4. 4Department of Medicine, Akershus University Hospital, Lørenskog, Norway
  1. Correspondence to Professor Ole Morten Rønning, Department of Neurology, Akershus University Hospital, Lørenskog 1478, Norway; omro{at}online.no

https://doi.org/10.1136/jnnp.2009.186965

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Pregnancy and the puerperium are prothrombotic states. Stroke is rare in pregnancy and the puerperium but is the cause of death in 12% of all maternal deaths.1

    Pregnancy-related strokes occur late in pregnancy or in the postpartum period, with the highest risk after delivery.2 Hypercoagulopathy, venous stasis, endothelial injury, postpartum angiopathy, cerebral aneurysms, paradox embolism and cerebral venous thrombosis are all known possible aetiologies of pregnancy-associated stroke. One rare cause of acute ischaemic stroke in young women is cardiac thromboembolism caused by peripartum cardiomyopathy (PPCM). Cardiomyopathy is a known cause of cardioembolic stroke. PPCM is a cardiomyopathy that presents in the peripartum period in patients without a known pre-existing heart disease. The diagnosis is based on exclusion of other possible causes of cardiomyopathy. PPCM presents most often within the last months of pregnancy and the first 6 months after.

    Pregnancy and the first 4 weeks after delivery are considered exclusion criteria for thrombolysis following acute stroke. More …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Competing interests None.

    • Patient consent Obtained.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.