UChicago Medicine raising awareness about stroke risk

Lucas Wittwer was bouldering at a climbing gym when he fell and passed out.

It was 2022. He was only 27 years old, and when he regained consciousness he felt fine.

“I was very annoyed that they were not letting me just go,” Wittwer said recently. “I felt fine. I was slightly confused.”

He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital and later to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where he was treated for a hemorrhagic stroke from an aneurysm. He still has no memory of two of those days, during which doctors performed an aneurysm embolization.

Wittwer joined the University of Chicago Medical Center and Philips, a health technology company, on Wednesday on a behind-the-scenes day held as part of National Stroke Awareness Month. Over the last two decades, the risk of a stroke has increased by 50%, according to the World Health Organization. Former Mayor Richard M. Daley, Chicago’s longest-serving mayor, was hospitalized recently after his third stroke.

Some patients, like Wittwer, had no warning signs before an aneurysm. But doctors at the University of Chicago Medical Center said balance abnormality, eyesight changes, facial droop or difficulty speaking all could be signs of a stroke.

They also usually see a link between a stroke and existing conditions, in particular hypertension. Cedric McKoy, a nurse practitioner for the hospital’s stroke program, said that’s one reason he urges people to focus on getting their high blood pressure under control and improving their diet to reduce the risk.

While the number of strokes across the country has fluctuated, McKoy said he continues to see a rise in stroke patients among the patients — predominately people of color — they serve on the South Side .

Another reason for more stroke patients is improved treatments like reperfusion therapy, which helps restore blood flow after a heart attack, said Dr. James Siegler, medical director of the hospital’s Comprehensive Stroke Center.

“We’re restoring healthy brain function, getting patients mobilized, but they still have those underlying vascular risk factors, and they’ve had those vascular risk factors build up over time,” Siegler said.

The technology doctors use to treat stroke patients has also vastly improved even in the last couple of years, said Dr. Tareq Kass-Hout, a stroke neurologist who treated Wittwer. The hospital is also using a room known as an intervention suite to bypass the emergency room for certain patients who rate higher on a stroke scale.

The room has a machine that rotates around a person to scan them, allowing doctors to immediately start a procedure rather than waiting for a CT scan and moving the patient around the hospital, Kass-Hout said. Doctors say they consider every second critical when treating a stroke patient.

The procedure usually involves using tiny wires and catheters inserted through a person’s wrist or groin to extract a blood clot or repair an aneurysm.

It’s considered a less invasive procedure and sometimes can take as little as six minutes. Kass-Hout said he thinks technology, including artificial intelligence, will continue to improve so much he could one day conduct these types of procedures remotely, providing wider access to patients who live in more rural areas.

“I always joke with my kids that they sit on their phone playing FIFA, one day I’m going to be sitting playing stroke. They’re doing their thing, I’m doing my thing at the same time,” Kass-Hout said. “This is, again, not science fiction. We’re going to see it in the next few years.”

In Wittwer’s case, the procedure took about 30 minutes because it was considered more complex, and that also meant that he spent more time in the hospital than other patients. But he's back to feeling how he felt before the aneurysm.

“I’m really lucky,” he said — and he's bouldering again.