It looked like a seizure when little Alexzandra Gonzales jerked and then went limp, barely breathing. A frantic race to the hospital led to a diagnosis her parents found hard to believe: Just days before her first birthday, she had had a stroke. “We never knew that children could have strokes,” says her mother, Amanda Gonzales.It’s a common misconception, yet several thousand U.S. children a year suffer strokes — and some specialists fear they’re on the rise. Only now are efforts under way to detect strokes faster in these smallest patients and begin figuring out how to treat them, to help rescue their brains."It gets short shrift,” complains Dr. Raymond Pitetti, assistant emergency medicine chief at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, who developed a “stroke team” for kids, to speed diagnosis after counting an increase in victims in his emergency room."There are a lot of knowledge gaps,” agrees Dr. John Lynch of the National Institutes of Health, whose research is pointing to possible unrecognized genetic culprits.Strokes are rare in children. Still, Lynch estimates that about 1,000 infants a year suffer a stroke during the newborn period or before birth — plus anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 children from age 1 month to 18 years.
