What Is a Stroke?

Video Transcript

"What is a stroke? A stroke is a brain attack. It's similar to a heart attack, but it happens to the brain. What a stroke is it's something that causes lack of blood flow to the brain. When certain parts of your brain don't receive the blood that they need, they don't get the oxygen they need and it causes that temporary shut off and eventually to die. So a stroke is basically just an exclusion of oxygen to the brain. Now there's two different types of strokes. Two different types of strokes are Hemorrhagic and Ischemic Stroke. Here's the two side by side. Hemorrhagic Stroke is caused when a blood vessel in your brain begins to bleed. This is more serious and this as it demonstrates here, when a vessel starts to bleed, it bleeds out and it interferes with the flow of blood, the flow of oxygen and part of the brain begins to suffer and eventually die. The other type is called the Ischemic Stroke. Ischemic means lack of oxygen. What happens here is something stops the blood flow to the brain. A lot of times it could be a clot, and something that excludes the that vein from bringing the oxygen up to the brain. So as you can see in this drawing here there's an exclusion right here, the blood is not able to flow to bring the oxygen and nutrients to the brain and this part of the brain is starting to die. A few other pictures to demonstrate this again. This is a Hemorrhagic, so Hemorrhagic bleeding, this is when the vessel begins to bleed. As you can see the vessel here is bleeding and so all the areas around here aren't getting the blood flow that they need due to the leak. And here Ischemic Stroke displaying the blood clot which is causing the vein's inability to bring the blood up to the brain. So there's the two types of stroke. Again, here's Hemorrhagic Stroke, the one caused by bleeding. As you can see the blood vessel here has been ruptured, interrupting the blood supply to the brain and this whole area of the brain is not getting the blood supply that it needs. That the blood, it doesn't get the oxygen and it begins to die. Ischemic Stroke again, here's what a common clot looks like. This one would be a blood clot which stops the flow of blood through this vessel and thus beyond the clot, it's not getting the oxygen that it needs and this part of the brain begins to die."