Anemia and its association with global disability outcomes in stroke patients who underwent reperfusion therapy

Abstract

Strokes are one of the most important causes of mortality and mobility in the industrialized countries, including Portugal. Anemia is a common pre-morbid condition in ischemic stroke patients, and it has a negative impact on the prognosis of patients treated with a conservative approach. Its effect on patients subjected to reperfusion therapy, which aims at rescuing ischemic cerebral tissue, still requires further study. Thus, we planned to study the effect of both pre-procedure and early onset post-procedure anemia on the prognosis of ischemic stroke patients subjected to reperfusion therapy. To test our hypothesis, we conducted a retrospective case-control analysis of ischemic stroke patients subjected to reperfusion therapy (thrombectomy or/and thrombolysis) in the year of 2019 in Centro Hospitalar de São João (CHSJ) - including patients who were subjected to thrombectomy in Centro Hospitalar Universitário do Porto and who were posteriorly transferred. We found the presence anemia (before treatment and after treatment) to have a statistically significant association with the development of worse functional outcomes and mortality rates, and this relationship was also present in every treatment subgroup analysis - though only statistically significant for the functional outcome in the thrombectomy subgroup and for the mortality rate in the thrombolysis subgroup.