Reply to Elderly parent had a major stroke just weeks after cardio said all looked good

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m confused why you’re saying it could be because of plaque build up. That’s my entire point. She just had a full cardio work up. Anyway, I just don’t understand what caused the stroke. And yes, I know, old age, etc. But it makes me wonder why we bothered dragging her to these stressful appointments when they don’t seem to mean much anyway [/quote]

Because you can have perfectly normal numbers during your appointment, and bloodwork within the normal range, and still, a clot might form that creates serious harm. It's statistical. Every day, you have little clumps of fat and cells that threaten to block some of your arteries, OP. But they all manage to pass in the end, so you are not aware of the danger you evaded. But with age, arteries become more fragile and one of those little clumps, which might have gone on their merry way safely before, happens to stay there and wreck that part of the brain (or pulmonary artery, etc). You cannot know in advance who will be hit at what time with a unfortunately-placed clot!

Medical check-ups are designed to catch the worst, but if the patient has never been a high-risk patient, sometimes the exams stay pretty basic, because despite great technological progress, standard of care can be quite low in certain populations in certain locations. Did your parent ever have a coronary calcium scan? It's one way to measure plaque build-up. However, we have no tool to accurately predict when a random clot might turn out to be a deadly stroke-inducer.

In patients who suffer from the medical check-up itself, ie, patients in pain, the elderly with limited mobility and stamina, the very young, or anyone with limited understanding, there is always a medical calculus to be made of how far to explore before the burden of testing outweighs the benefits of said tests.

And that's before you get to questions of insurance reimbursement and what is allowed by patients' healthcare plans. Sometimes doctors, consciously or unconsciously, make assumptions about patients' willingness to pay for expensive exams.

And then there are doctors like my husband, who will order every test that pertains to your condition so as to get the most complete picture, regardless of how expensive or dammed uncomfortable it might be for you. His mother had to insist that no, at her age she did not want a colonoscopy...

I'm sorry, OP. [/quote]

Thank you to the above PP for the detailed explanation with context. - NP[/quote]

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