Abstract
Background
People often ignore the usefulness of stroke prevention, the typical onset symptoms, and the efficacy of the new therapies. In order to attempt to correct this situation, we performed an educational campaign addressed to Rotary club associates and their relatives or friends in the Italian Rotary District 2032.
Method
The campaign consisted in three phases: (1) Compilation of a simple questionnaire on stroke, followed by a scientific relation on the disease, distribution of didactic materials, and organization of screening sessions on individual stroke risk evaluation; (2) Recompilation by participants of the same previous questionnaire; (3) Statistical evaluation of the improvement of stroke knowledge.
Results
The initial percentage of wrong answers (number of subjects 657) was 22.41% ((A) stroke general knowledge 15.45%; (B) stroke risk factors 25.65%; (C) Stroke early symptoms 22.65%). At the end of the campaign, the total percentage of wrong answers (number of subjects 296) attained the 13.18% ((A) stroke general knowledge 8.22%; (B) stroke risk factors 14.98%; (C) stroke early symptoms 13.85%). All these differences were strongly significant at the statistical analysis.
Discussion and conclusion
We demonstrated that our educational campaign obtained an important improvement of stroke awareness in our sample. We hope that the enhanced awareness might induce a more frequent diffusion of primary prevention strategies, an increased capacity of recognizing onset stroke symptoms with shortening of patients’ presentation in the Emergency Room of the hospitals when they can undergo thrombolysis/thrombectomy.
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Funding
The project received financial support from Rotary International.
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All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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The Governor and the Project Commission of the Rotary District 2032 approved the educational campaign. The study was performed in accordance with the ethical standards laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments. Any details that might disclose the identity of the subjects under study was omitted before the analysis. All recruited persons gave their informed consent prior to their inclusion in the study.
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Gandolfo, C., Alberti, F., Del Sette, M. et al. Results of an educational campaign on stroke awareness in the 2032 Rotary District in Northern-Western Italy. Neurol Sci 41, 411–416 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-019-04126-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-019-04126-5