(VSRao, Pixabay)
1 May 2020. An analysis of medical records shows individuals age 30 to 50 with Covid-19 infections are more likely to experience a stroke than their non-infected counterparts. The findings from medical analytics company TriNetX Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts support reports published earlier this week in New England Journal of Medicine of strokes in multiple young adult patients with Covid-19 infections at the Mount Sinai health system in New York.
On 28 April, New England Journal of Medicine published a letter from a group of physicians at Mount Sinai that treated five patients, all in their 30s and 40s within two weeks in late March and early April. Each of the patients experienced a large-vessel stroke, a blood clot in a larger artery in the brain that in most cases begins with fatty plaque debris from elsewhere in the cardiovascular system. All five patients also tested positive for Covid-19 infections. In any other two-week period in the previous 12 months, say the authors, the hospital treated on average less than one stroke patient under the age of 50.
TriNetX collects and analyzes de-identified data from patients’ medical records and clinical trials to derive real-world evidence for medical decision-making and design of clinical studies. The company says its network of participating health care providers offers records on some 400 million patients at 150 health care providers in 25 countries. In addition, TriNetX analyzes more than 26,000 clinical trials protocols to provide more than 7,000 trial opportunities for members. Clients of TriNetX, says the company, often apply their own algorithms and analytics to the company’s databases.
A team at TriNetX analyzed records in its databases since January of this year to the present, covering the time of the pandemic. The analysis found 66,700 cases of stroke during this time. Of those individuals, about a quarter (26%) were between the age of 30 and 50. During other periods, that age range accounts for about one in 10 (11%) strokes.
“What is striking,” says Jennifer Stacey, vice president for clinical sciences at TriNetX in a company statement, “is not that there are more strokes in Covid-19 victims, but more strokes in a younger population where you wouldn’t normally see them. The findings are telling us there are a lot of patients in their 30s and 40s who are otherwise healthy who unexpectedly suffered a stroke and subsequently tested positive for Covid-19. Our data replicated exactly what the doctors at Mount Sinai were reporting, but in a much larger global patient population.”
The company says it has the largest available clinical data sets of patients diagnosed with Covid-19. Stacey adds these data sets are “enabling researchers to study patients who have received various therapies to assess the true effectiveness they are having on actual Covid-19 patients.”
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