Why the study?
The impact of catastrophic events like terror attacks on the physical health of local community members is less known, including whether acute psychological stress increases stroke incidence or severity.
Does acute psychological stress from a terror attack increase the rate of stroke reperfusion treatment, large vessel occlusion, and total stroke admissions in the local community?
Does acute psychological stress from a terror attack increase the rate of stroke reperfusion treatment, large vessel occlusion, and total stroke admissions in the local community?
Acute psychological stress from a catastrophic event like a terror attack may be associated with an increased incidence of severe ischemic strokes requiring reperfusion.
May indicate community rise in large-vessel strokes after terror attack; leaves open stress trigger hypothesis.
Sudden catastrophic events such as terror attacks have clear and immediate consequences for the people who are directly affected. However, less is known about the impact on the physical health of local community members (online supplemental available from Dryad [doi.org/10.5061/dryad.bcc2fqz9t][1] for further discussion). Acute psychological stress may cause a parallel physiologic response increasing risk of cardiovascular events.1–3 On March 15, 2019, a gunman shot and killed 51 people praying at the Al Noor and Linwood mosques in Christchurch city, New Zealand. We observed an increase in ischemic stroke reperfusion treatments in the week starting Monday, March 18, 3 days after the terror attack. We hypothesized that this observation could have occurred because of either an effect of the attack on the total number of ischemic strokes and/or the severity of these strokes, or coincidence. We investigated these possibilities by analyzing the association between the terror attack and rate of stroke reperfusion treatment, proven intracranial large vessel occlusion (LVO), and total stroke admissions at Christchurch hospital and the national stroke data set. [1]: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.bcc2fqz9t
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Wu et al. (2020) studied this question.
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