The Cincinnati Stroke Scale

Video Transcript

"When do you want to seek medical care? Whenever you see any of these signs or symptoms of a stroke that we just discussed, it would be a good idea to seek medical care as quickly as possible. With a stroke, the greatest thing that's going to help a person having a stroke is to get them to a medical facility as quickly as possible. Now I'm going to cover a test which is called a Cincinnati Stroke Scale and this is going to demonstrate a quick way that you can determine if someone is having a stroke or not. This is just a better way to identify the symptoms of a stroke. It's based on three factors, the first factor is going to be the facial droop. As we discussed earlier, the facial droop, what you want to do is when you're talking with someone, you want them to show you a big smile and if you can have them show you their teeth. So you want to do a big smile, get all those muscles in the face working. If it's positive for a stroke it's going to look like this. If they're able to smile with both sides looking equal, then there's a good chance that that test is going to come back negative. The next step is called pronated drifter, arm drift. What you want to do is you want to have the person that you suspect having a stroke, you want to have them put their arms straight up in front of them like this and you want them to close their eyes. If they're healthy and not having problems from the stroke, then both arms will stay up and just have them close their eyes for a few seconds and their arms will stay up. If they're not and they're showing signs of a stroke, one of their arms are going to drift down by their self, they won't be able to hold it up. The final test is you want to test their speech and see how their speech is. So what you can do is you can give them a simple phrase to say such as you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Or some type of simple phrase, it's going to test. And what you test with that is you see if they're able to speak clearly without slurring their speech or without garbled speech. If they're showing signs of a stroke, they're speech isn't going to be very clear, and it's going to be garbled speech or it might not be clear. They might also be confused in terms of repeating the statement that you ask them to repeat. So with all those, there's three different things, if they test positive being that they're showing the symptoms that means that will lead to a good possibility that they're having a stroke. Again the quickest thing that you want to do is to call medical personnel as soon as possible, get them to a hospital as quickly as you can. With that test, if they pass everything and they're not showing signs, those signs doesn't necessarily mean that they're not having a stroke. And so the potential of still having a stroke is still there, but it's still a good idea to get them seeing be a medical personnel."