Woman Suffers Stroke After Sexual Intercourse

In an unusual incidence, a woman suffered a stroke soon after having sex with her boyfriend. The 35-year old woman Pamela (name changed) a resident of Maywodd, Illinois, said she suddenly lost sensations on the left side of her face and her left arm go weak after having sexual intercourse with her boyfriend.

She further stated that her speech became slurred. Doctors at the Loyola University Medical Centre, Illinois in US later asserted that the woman was having a stroke.

The doctors believe though rare, but stroke is possible after having sex, if a woman is having heart complications, taking birth control pills, has a blood clot and indulges in sexual intercourse.

Oral contraceptives, also called birth control pills, are taken by millions of women to help prevent pregnancy. But, experts believe these pills slightly increase the risk of blood clots.

What bewildered the Loyola University Medical Centre doctors was that this woman was a young, healthy and nonsmoking with no known cardiovascular risk factors.

Soon after having complications, triggered by sexual intercourse, the woman was taken to a community hospital, where doctors referred her to Loyola. Pamela arrived at Loyola six hours after her stroke.

"She was in a real state of panic," recalled Jose Biller, chairman of the department of neurology at the Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago. "The family, the boyfriend, everyone was very disturbed."

The woman arrived at Loyola six hours after her stroke, and her stroke score was 13, on a scale of 1 to 43, with 43 representing the most catastrophic outcome. Though it was too late to treat the woman with tPA, a drug that is administered to heart attack or stroke victims to bust blood clots, but the doctors still had confidence that they could reverse stroke damage.

The anti-clotting drug is safe and effective if given intravenously within three hours of the beginning of symptoms. The doctors asserted that the drug still could work if it were delivered directly into the affected blood vessel in the brain. Then an interventional neuroradiologist inserted a catheterdefine (thin tube) into a groin arterydefine, and guided it up to the spot in the brain where the clot was lodged. And, what the doctors noticed was dramatic, the catheter delivered the tPA, and after coming in contact with the rug the clot began to dissolve.

"In this case, there was a hole in a wall of the heart. Pressure changes in the heart, triggered by sexual intercourse, enabled the clot to travel through the hole from the right atrium to the left atrium," Biller said.

"From there, the clot traveled up to the brain. It lodged in a narrow blood vessel, blocking blood flow to an area of the brain that controls movements on the left side of the body," he added.

Biller and his team of doctors described this unique in the Journal of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Disease.