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Reflecting on Cerebral Venous Sinus Thrombosis, and the U.S. Presidential Election - The Stroke Blog
Just after New Year’s Day in 2013, I was asked by a local news station about a story in the mainstream media involving a “blood clot in the brain.” At-the-time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had fallen and hit her head, and this was followed soon afterwards by a diagnosis of a blood clot “in the vein between the brain and…skull,” according to this news article. I recognized over the following week while the story played out in the news that, while Clinton’s clot was not the same thing as one might think of an ischemic stroke, there was little understanding outside of the medical community of how her neurological issue differed from the large majority of blood clots in the brain. I even received several questions about it from patients, the most common one being – did Hillary Clinton have a stroke? And my answer was – not exactly. Ischemic strokes, as we think of them, involve an obstruction in an artery that is preventing oxygen-rich blood from reaching its target destination within the brain. Arteries can be blocked by blood clots, plaque accumulation within the wall of the vessel, a torn lining in the wall of the artery (dissection), or even overgrowth of cells within the […]
Jodi Gehring, MD