s’Bleeding’ stroke patients with COVID-19 are more than twice as likely to die as those without COVID-19, new research shows.
For the study, a research team from the University of Utah analyzed data from 568 hospitals in the United States. They compared a control group of more than 23,300 patients without COVID-19 who suffered a bleeding (hemorrhagic) stroke to 771 COVID-19 patients who had hemorrhagic strokes.
“This is one of the first studies to document that, in patients with hemorrhagic stroke who have comorbid [occuring at the same time] COVID-19, there is a significantly elevated risk of in-hospital death,” said senior study author Dr. Adam de Havenon, assistant professor of neurology.
“This finding warrants additional study and potentially more aggressive treatment of either condition,” he said in a university news release.
The study patients were grouped by the type of bleeding stroke they suffered: intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), caused by bleeding within the brain; or subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), caused by bleeding from a damaged artery on the brain’s surface.
Compared to ICH patients in the control group, the 559 patients with both COVID-19 and ICH had a higher in-hospital death rate (46% versus 18%); longer hospital stays (21 days versus 10); and longer intensive care unit (ICU) stays (16 days versus six).
About half of the ICH patients in the control group had favorable outcomes, compared with about one-quarter of ICH patients with COVID-19, according to the report.
