About 60,000 stroke patients are admitted to government hospitals in Sri Lanka each year, and close to 4,000 of them die, the President of the National Stroke Association of Sri Lanka, Dr Gamini Pathirana, said on World Stroke Day.
Speaking at a media briefing, he said stroke remains one of the most common and dangerous illnesses affecting Sri Lankans, and that many people still underestimate its impact, NewsFirst reported at 11.01 a.m. on Thursday.
On those figures roughly one in fifteen patients admitted for a stroke dies in hospital.
What a stroke is
“When the blood supply to the brain and its cells is disrupted, brain cells begin to die. This happens suddenly. That condition is what we call a stroke. It is a very common medical condition,” Dr Pathirana said.
He explained that when blood flow to a particular part of the brain is blocked, that area dies and the functions it controls stop. “If blood supply to a section of the brain is blocked, that area dies. As a result, the functions carried out by that part of the brain stop.”
A stroke can take away a person’s ability to walk, speak, work or recognise the people closest to them.
The underlying cause
One of the main causes is atherosclerosis — a build-up of fatty deposits inside the blood vessels.
Dr Pathirana made the point that this is not a disease of the brain alone. “This process can occur in blood vessels anywhere in the body, not just those supplying the brain. When it affects the heart, it causes a heart attack. When it affects the brain, it causes a stroke. In many ways, a stroke is the brain’s equivalent of a heart attack.”
That framing matters for prevention: the risk factors that drive heart disease drive stroke through the same mechanism.
World Stroke Day falls on 29 October.
Not reported
The filing gives no breakdown of the 60,000 admissions by stroke type, age or sex, and does not say over what period the figures were compiled or which dataset they come from. It gives no figure for deaths outside hospital, no trend — whether admissions are rising or falling — and no comparison with earlier years or with other countries.
It does not list the risk factors a reader could act on beyond naming atherosclerosis, carries no warning signs or guidance on how quickly to seek treatment, and does not report what treatment capacity government hospitals have, how many are equipped for emergency stroke care, or what the association is asking of government. The briefing’s date, venue and organiser are not stated beyond the occasion.
Single source. This desk checked the Daily Mirror’s breaking-news listing and the Hiru News homepage rail; neither had filed on the briefing at the time of writing. Ada Derana has returned an HTTP 403 to this desk for some 48 consecutive days and could not be consulted. The figures are consistent in magnitude with Health Ministry annual statistics reported previously, but this desk has cited only the figures Dr Pathirana gave at Thursday’s briefing.
