Development and Validation of a Postprocedure Stroke Screening Tool in Children With Cardiac Disease.

Background: Cardiac catheterization in children with heart disease is associated with an increased risk of arterial ischemic stroke. We created and evaluated the diagnostic performance of a bedside screening tool administered postprocedure to identify arterial ischemic stroke.

Methods: We developed a postprocedure stroke screen comprising history of stroke, responsiveness, command following, speech, facial and limb strength symmetry, new seizure, and caregiver concern. We compared the performance of the screening tool in a retrospective cohort of 21 patients with a postcatheterization arterial ischemic stroke and a prospective cohort of 100 consecutive control patients after cardiac catheterization.

Results: The postprocedure stroke screen delivered a maximum Youden index ranging from 0.810 to 0.937 at threshold scores of 2 or 2.5 and gave a sensitivity and specificity >0.9. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve ranged from 0.931 to 0.946.

Conclusions: We developed a screening tool with high sensitivity and specificity to identify postcatheterization arterial ischemic stroke in children.