Intermountain Health doctors see uptick in younger adults having strokes

OGDEN, Utah — A North Ogden man says he is both lucky and thankful to be alive after suffering a stroke last October.

Brad Coleman is a 36-year-old father of four.

He says his wife was driving them to one of their daughter’s soccer games when he noticed something wasn’t right.

“My speech became very slurred. I was confused,” Brad said. “Then at one point [I] kind of slumped over in the seat and wasn’t making any sense.”

Brad says his wife, Melissa, told him his face was starting to droop.

“I just looked right at him and I said, ‘You’re having a stroke,'” Melissa said.

The Colemans didn’t waste any time. Melissa took her husband to an emergency room near their home.

She says through a CT scan, doctors were able to confirm that Brad had a clot in his brain.

Brad was given an anticoagulant before ultimately being transported by ambulance to McKay-Dee Hospital for surgery.

“He had a thrombectomy, they went up through his groin, through his heart, up into his brain and actually removed the clot, pulled the clot out,” Melissa said.

In all, Melissa says, from the time they arrived at the hospital until the time Brad’s procedure was done was 13 minutes.

“From the moment I had my first symptoms until the clot was out was a total of 90 minutes,” Brad said.

McKay-Dee Hospital had been designated a Primary Stroke Center since 2007, performing hundreds of mechanical thrombectomies since 2011.

Recently, it became the first certified Joint Commission Thrombectomy-Capable Stroke Center in Utah. That means if paramedics suspect a patient has a large vessel blockage stroke and they were last seen normal between four to 24 hours, EMS can bypass other hospitals and emergently transport patients directly to McKay-Dee Hospital.

“Every minute that goes by is another estimated two million brain cells lost,” said Dr. Melissa McDonald, the stroke medical director at McKay-Dee Hospital.

Dr. Michael Webb, an Interventional Radiologist at McKay-Dee Hospital says they’ve seen an uptick in recent years with younger adults suffering strokes.

“One reason that we think is, that COVID causes an increase in our, our blood clotting,” said Dr. Webb.

According to data released by the American Heart Association last year, they have seen an increase in the number of strokes in younger adults, under the age of 45, since 2007.

Over a 10-year period, the research shows that the rate of hospitalizations for younger adults who suffered a stroke increased nearly 50-percent, from 2007 to 2017.

Despite having a stroke, Brad says he was able to leave the ICU three days later, without any physical limitations.

“Between my wife and, and the care team, they made all the difference for me to continue to hunt, to live life the way I always have,” Brad said.

May is National Stroke Awareness Month and Intermountain Healthcare doctors want patients to recognize the signs of a stroke.

They say a good way to remember the signs of a stroke are with the acronym, BE FAST:

B = Balance — sudden dizziness or loss of balance and coordination

E = Eyes — sudden trouble seeing in one or both eyes

F = Face — sudden weakness of the face

A = Arm — weakness of an arm or leg

S = Speech — sudden difficulty speaking

T = Time — time the symptoms started.

Intermountain Healthcare says only around 40 percent of people in the United States can identify the major symptoms of a stroke.

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