nfections of the heart, particularly on or around the valves or on the wires from a pacemaker raise the risk of stroke and cerebral hemorrhage considerably. Infective material in the heart is often highly mobile and bits can break off an embolize to the brain. Once there, they can block arteries causing strokes, they can seed new infections causing abscesses or meningitis/encephalitis and they can infect blood vessels leading aneurysms and/or hemorrhages.
The key to treating this sort of stroke is to control the infection. Patients require long term antibiotics and many require surgical removal of infected material from the heart. It is also critically important to identify where the infection came from and try to treat that (infected teeth, infected kidney stones, infected ports, dialysis and injection drug use are common causes).
Our team is committed to providing cutting edge care for patients with cerebrovascular complications from infective endocarditis. This requires a multidisciplinary team and many patients will need care from infectious disease specialists, cardiologists and/or cardiothoracic surgeons, neurologists and psychiatrists.