Excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) is a prevalent symptom among stroke survivors. This symptom is an independent risk factor for stroke and may reduce stroke survivors' quality of life, cognitive functioning, and daytime functional performance.
Sleep is important for good health, especially for somebody recovering from a stroke. It plays a significant part in healing the brain and in aiding physical recovery.
This is because the brain requires extra energy to heal the damage incurred, leaving less energy available for typical functions such as staying alert. Furthermore, studies have shown that sleep promotes neuroplasticity after stroke.
In the early weeks and months after a stroke your body is healing and the rehabilitation process takes up a lot of energy so it is very common to feel tired.
Fatigue can happen after any type of stroke, and you can have severe fatigue after a relatively mild stroke or a TIA. Even if you have made a full physical recovery, or your stroke was some time ago, fatigue can still be a problem.
Acute fatigue can last up to 6 months. Chronic fatigue can persist in 40% of patients after 2 years of the stroke onset. Fatigue may still be present in one-third of patients up to 6 years after stroke onset. One in three people experience depression during the 5 years after their stroke due to post-stroke fatigue.
For this reason, the 60 minutes after the onset of stroke symptoms are known as “the golden hour.” If treatment can be initiated within this brief window, the patient's outcome is likely to be better.
How Does a Stroke Impact Life Expectancy? Despite the likelihood of making a full recovery, life expectancy after stroke incidents can decrease. Unfortunately, researchers have observed a wide range of life expectancy changes in stroke patients, but the average reduction in lifespan is nine and a half years.
By 1 year, 40.3% (95% confidence interval [CI] 37.3%–43.5%) of stroke patients had died, 51.9% (95% CI 48.7%–55.1%) by 2 years, and 72.8% (95% CI 69.4%–76.1%) by 5 years (figure 1A). Median survival was 1.8 years (95% CI 1.6–2.1 years) after stroke.
Two-thirds of stroke survivors have a condition known as sleep-disordered breathing (SDB), which is characterized by abnormal breathing patterns that interrupt your sleep during the night. As a result of SDB, you may be very sleepy during the day and have more difficulty concentrating or solving problems.
Stroke impacts the brain, and the brain controls our behavior and emotions. You or your loved one may experience feelings of irritability, forgetfulness, carelessness or confusion. Feelings of anger, anxiety or depression are also common.
Meanwhile, stroke risk was doubled for those sleeping more than 9 hours per night compared to those sleeping 7 hours. Sleep apnea — pauses in breathing multiple times per hour — was linked to a three times higher stroke risk.
Most Stroke Survivors Are Able to Return Home
It is important to remember that many stroke survivors are perfectly able to return to their homes and independent living. Your parent is not unusual in that regard. If the doctor says they are able to live on their own, then you can be reasonably confident that it is true.
Improvement tends to be fastest in the first few days or weeks after stroke, but can continue slowly for months or even years. However, everyone is different and there is no fixed time for recovery. A physiotherapist can assess you and recommend therapy or exercises that may help you to recover.
Even after surviving a stroke, you're not out of the woods, since having one makes it a lot more likely that you'll have another. In fact, of the 795,000 Americans who will have a first stroke this year, 23 percent will suffer a second stroke.
Medical experts often use the NIH Stroke Scale to determine the severity of a stroke. Patients that score between 21 and 42 (the highest possible score) are considered to have suffered a massive stroke.
Few patients recover fully and most are left with some disability, but the majority exhibit some degree of spontaneous recovery. Doctors and scientists don't fully understand how this happens, because the brain does not grow new cells to replace the ones damaged by the stroke.
However, most providers assess progress using Brunnstrom's seven stages of stroke recovery, which include the following: flaccidity, spasticity appears, spasticity increases, spasticity decreases, complex movement combinations, spasticity disappears, and normal function returns.
Mortality within 72 hours after stroke onset was 5.0% (32 patients) and a further 4.2% (27 patients) died within ten days. At discharge from the stroke unit, 63.9% of the 571 patients who survived went directly to their home with or without homecare and the other patients required further hospital based rehabilitation.
Regarding the duration of fatigue after stroke, acute fatigue can last up to 6 months, whereas the chronic type can persist in 40% of patients after 2 years. Another study reported fatigue to be still present in one-third of patients up to 6 years after stroke onset.
Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor suggests sleep as her #1 recommendation for stroke survivors. When the brain is busy recovering, sleep is one of the best ways you can aid recovery. While post-stroke fatigue doesn't always improve with sleep, it's still good to get plenty of rest. Sleep allows the brain to recover.
Try to schedule demanding physical or mental activities throughout the day or week. That way, you'll plan to take rest breaks before you feel tired. Consider modifying your home and work environment to make them more efficient.
Stress can cause the heart to work harder, increase blood pressure, and increase sugar and fat levels in the blood. These things, in turn, can increase the risk of clots forming and travelling to the heart or brain, causing a heart attack or stroke.