It is only a minor heart defect, one attributed to one out of every four adults. And while the defect is not said to cause strokes, about 40% of people who suffer strokes--ones with no known cause--are said to have the defect. As the cause and effect has been explored for years, another medical case recently brought the connection back into the news.
In December of 2007, a 35-year-old Illinois woman began to feel stroke-like symptoms during intercourse. With numbness on one side of her face, slurred speech, and weakness in her left arm, she sought care at a medical facility and her condition worsened considerably over the next few hours. Face paralysis, garbled speech, and no movement in the left arm led the doctors to apply a clot-dissipating drug directly to the clot in her brain in an urgent effort to stop the stroke from progressing, and it worked. There was immediate improvement, and the stroke symptoms were nearly erased within 12 hours of the procedure.
Jose Biller, M.D., Professor and Chair of the neurology department at Loyola University in Chicago was the head of the medical team that treated the woman, and the experienced spawned a report that appeared in the September issue of Journal of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Diseases. The doctor initially looked further into the case because the woman was healthy with no history of cardiovascular disease; she was a young non-smoker with no known health concerns.
Strokes triggered by sex and/or orgasm are said to be rare in young people, but the factors that combine to cause the strokes in those situation are not uncommon, it is only their convergence that makes them unique. And the factor that Biller has examined is a minor heart defect called PFO, a patent foramen ovale, which is a small opening in the wall between the two upper chambers of the heart that allows blood to bypass the lung and flow straight to the brain.
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