ISC 2026 | SEED qualitative study: perspectives on stroke care in individuals with pre-existing disability
Aravind Ganesh, MD, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada, discusses the SEED study, a mixed-methods research program that explores how patients, caregivers, and physicians approach stroke care in individuals with pre-existing disability or dementia. Dr Ganesh highlights that patients and caregivers prioritize preserving their quality of life after a stroke, focusing on maintaining activities of daily living that are personally valuable to them. This interview took place at the 2026 International Stroke Congress (ISC), held in New Orleans, LA.
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Transcript
SEED is a study that is very close to my heart. It’s a mixed-methods research program that we started a few years ago to try and understand how patients, caregivers, and physicians approach stroke care and their priorities with respect to the same when people have already been living with pre-existing disability or dementia, that’s a population that we often struggle to care for in practice...
SEED is a study that is very close to my heart. It’s a mixed-methods research program that we started a few years ago to try and understand how patients, caregivers, and physicians approach stroke care and their priorities with respect to the same when people have already been living with pre-existing disability or dementia, that’s a population that we often struggle to care for in practice. This particular component of the study that was presented at ISC was the patient and caregiver-facing aspect of the study, and we were trying to understand how patients and caregivers who have experienced pre-stroke disability, pre-stroke dementia, think about what kinds of outcomes are favorable and acceptable after a stroke, what their priorities are, and how that might inform how we decide to approach their stroke care. What we learned was that both patients and caregivers greatly prioritize the preservation of their quality of life after a stroke, recognizing fully that they may be looking at a longer life with greater disability. But what they are trying to prioritize for the most part is preserving activities of daily living that they deem personally valuable and important to them, such as, say, certain hobbies that they’re still able to do or certain activities with their families that they’re still able to do. And this ties in very nicely with how we, in the healthcare setting, think about quality of life. Importantly, it also tells us that just because somebody is living with disability or living with dementia before a stroke, it doesn’t automatically mean that they have a bad quality of life. So there are elements of quality of life that these patients and families very much want to preserve, and what we hope is that the insights that we’ve presented from that study, including some of the quotes from the in-depth interviews that we did with the patients and caregivers, will help physicians think about how they approach decision-making with these patients and their families, ideally in a shared fashion, given that at present we have limited high-quality evidence on the best approach to reperfusion therapies, for example, in this population.
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