TIA – Confirmation

Transcript

To confirm the diagnosis of TIA is difficult. Often this is a disease of sort of exclusion, meaning we’ve excluded a stroke, we’ve excluded other things, and all we’re left with is a TIA. I point out that because it’s a diagnosis of exclusion. This is sometimes a diagnosis that can be a little difficult to be certain about. That being said, you’ll do all the workup that we just talked about and you know, you’ll rule out that there’s been a stroke on the MRI, and you’ll rule out that there are some other obvious cause, a brain tumor or other things and you’ll assess someone’s risk factors for stroke. But you know, given the set of symptoms that someone has and the lack of a clearcut stroke, often that’s how we diagnose the TIA. That’s how we confirm it. And it’s at the end of the day, a diagnosis of exclusion, meaning we’ve excluded every other possibility that we can think of.