Hearing deterioration and deafness

In the course of a stroke, damage to nerve cells can lead to a deterioration of hearing or complete hearing loss. In both cases it is a so-called sensorineural hearing loss, which means that although acoustic stimuli can be correctly perceived and are transmitted through the auditory nerve, the processing of the information is disturbed. Since a stroke leads to the destruction of nerve cells, the hearing symptoms are not expected to improve during the course of the disease.

In some cases, tinnitus can be one of the first symptoms of a stroke, as it can indicate, among other things, a change in the blood flow in the inner ear. While the tinnitus itself usually disappears after a few hours, it can reappear if deafness results from the stroke. This can be explained by the fact that the brain tries to compensate for the lack of auditory information through the deafness, which can result in the development of tinnitus.

Memory disorder

Memory disorders occur relatively frequently as a result of strokes, but can take on different dimensions and affect different memory contents. Depending on the type of memory disorder, conclusions can be drawn about the location of the brain damage:

For example, if the focus of the stroke is in the area of the left temporal lobe, a disturbance of the so-called semantic knowledge is often observed. This mainly comprises factual knowledge, such as general or specialist knowledge.
The episodic memory, which comprises contents of the personal biography, is, however, impaired in the case of damage to the right frontal lobe.
Furthermore, there are numerous other memory disorders as a result of a stroke, which, in addition to forgetting old memory contents, can also make it difficult or even prevent the saving of new contents.

Development of epilepsy

Especially when larger areas of the cerebral cortex are affected by a stroke, so-called epilepsy foci can develop. These are areas of the brain that can be overexcited by the brain damage and can thus trigger epileptic seizures. A stroke that has occurred is thus the greatest risk factor for the development of epilepsy in old age.

It is assumed that 10-15% of stroke patients suffer from epileptic seizures during the course of their illness.These are usually so-called early attacks, which occur within the first days after a stroke. However, many of these patients remain seizure-free after the first event. Patients in whom the seizures occur only after a longer period of time are more often affected by recurrent seizures. This makes permanent treatment with antiepileptic drugs necessary. In rare cases, the epileptic focus can also be removed by epilepsy surgery, which very often means that the seizures subside permanently.