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Background Stroke unit care is associated with decrease in mortality and improvement in neurological outcome in patients with acute stroke. Heart rate is a commonly monitored variable in the stroke unit. However, little is known about tachycardia burden in the stroke unit and its association with outcome. Aims To investigate the effects of tachycardia burden in the stroke unit on functional outcome in patients with acute ischemic stroke. Methods We collected data from 246 patients with acute ischemic stroke admitted to our stroke unit between July 2013 and June 2014. Tachycardia burden was defined as duration of heart rate over 95 per minute divided by the total monitoring time, using the heart rate data sampled every 1 min. We divided the study population into quartiles of tachycardia burden and analyzed their association with poor three-month functional outcome (modified Rankin Scale score of ≥3). Results Among included patients (age, 67.4 ± 12.8; male, 53.7%), tachycardia burden was 0.7% (median, interquartile range [0.1–5.7%]). The patients with higher tachycardia burdens were older, more likely to have higher stroke severity, cardioembolic etiology, atrial fibrillation, fever, pneumonia, higher initial glucose level, and higher white blood cell count. As compared with the lowest quartile (Conclusions Patients with increased tachycardia burden during stroke unit stay have poor functional outcome. Countermeasures against worsening factors might be utilized for patients with increased tachycardia burden.

Background Controversy exists regarding the question of whether weight change decreases or increases the risk of mortality. Aim The aim of this study was to evaluate the prognostic importance of weight change on short-term outcomes in acute ischemic stroke patients. Methods A total of 654 patients with acute ischemic stroke were enrolled in this study from March 2010 to May 2013. We assessed the weight change of each participant between admission and discharge from the Department of Neurology. Weight change was defined as change ≥0.05 kg/baseline body mass index unit. We evaluated the short-term outcomes using a modified Rankin Scale at three-months after the onset of a stroke. Results Among the 654 patients, 35.2% were included in the weight-change group. Weight loss occurred in 24.6% of the participants during the hospital stay following the stroke, which lasted an average of nine-days. Compared with the weight-stable group, the pronounced weight-loss group had a higher risk of unfavorable outcomes (odds ratio 2.43; 95% confidence interval 1.12-5.25). Conclusions Short-term weight loss after stroke appears to be more common than we expected, and our results suggest that it is associated with unfavorable functional outcomes. Therefore, clinical nutrition should be considered as a component of medical treatment and weight loss should be monitored as an indicator of malnutrition.