Families and social networks don’t always help stroke victims

A recent study in Nature Communications shows that when stroke patients are surrounded by close connections like their immediate family, they are less likely to get to the hospital in time for treatment, compared to patients with looser social connections.

Amar Dhand is a neurologist at Harvard Medical School with a PhD in sociology from Oxford who studies the relationship between social connections and health. His team surveyed 175 stroke patients in Boston and St. Louis, and mapped their social networks against the time it took them to arrive at the hospital. The 67 patients who took more than six hours to arrive had both smaller and tighter-knit social networks than the 108 who arrived in under six hours…

“This is the biggest problem in stroke therapy today,” Dhand says. “The delay that is caused by patients and the caregivers. The social context is the largest part of the delay, hands down, in stroke patients arriving in hospital in time.” There’s a predictable sequence of events for stroke patients in close networks, he notes. Initially, a patient may delay telling their family about their symptoms, not wanting them to worry.  “Secondly, they [the family] over-negotiate the symptoms, and perhaps even argue about them,” Dhand says. “Then they all validate each others opinion to watch and wait.”

He calls it an”echo chamber,” where family members, hoping for the best, minimize the gravity of the situation and conflate it with previous, less severe illnesses.

In contrast, when patients with only loose social networks have a stroke, there isn’t as much dithering. Patients who suffer strokes in a public place may be sent to the emergency room out of an abundance of caution by employees of the mall, store, or restaurant where they are afflicted. In some cases, an ambulance may be called by someone who doesn’t want the responsibility of caring for the sick person.

Here is the full article.

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