Stroke in children and younger adults differs significantly from adult stroke, with varied presentations and a broader range of underlying causes such as congenital heart disease and arteriopathies. This episode highlights key diagnostic considerations and evolving approaches to treatment in these younger populations.
In this episode, Aaron L. Berkowitz, MD, PhD, FAAN, speaks with Thalia S. Field, MD, FRCPC, MHSc, coauthor of the article "Stroke in Children and Younger Adults" in the Continuum® June 2026 Cerebrovascular Disease issue.
Dr. Berkowitz is a Continuum® Audio interviewer and a professor of neurology in the Department of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, in San Francisco, California.
Dr. Field is a professor at the University of British Columbia and the Sauder Family Heart and Stroke Professor of Stroke Research, and a stroke neurologist at the Vancouver Stroke Program, Vancouver Coastal Health in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Additional Resources
Read the article: Stroke in Children and Younger Adults
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Host: @AaronLBerkowitz
Full episode transcript available here
Dr Berkowitz: Most neurologists are used to evaluating and treating adults with stroke since it's one of the most common neurologic conditions. But stroke can also occur in children, in infants, and even in utero. Today, I have the privilege of interviewing Dr. Thalia Field to talk about pediatric stroke.
Dr Jones: This is Dr. Lyell Jones, Editor-in-Chief of Continuum. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio. Be sure to visit the links in the episode notes for information about earning CME, subscribing to the journal, and exclusive access to interviews not featured on the podcast.
Dr Berkowitz: This is Dr. Aaron Berkowitz, and today I'm interviewing Dr. Thalia Field about her article on stroke in children and younger adults. This article appears in the June 2026 Continuum issue on cerebrovascular disease. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Field, and could you please introduce yourself to our audience?
Dr Field: Well, thanks so much. It's a pleasure to, uh, be speaking to you. I'm a stroke neurologist, and I treat adults generally. My wonderful colleague, Thivya Selvanathan, who's a neonatal neurologist, co-wrote the chapter with me. We do, unfortunately, have to treat some children with stroke collaboratively and I do advise on those cases. My practice is about one-quarter clinical, so I treat patients with acute stroke, look after them on the wards, see patients in stroke prevention clinic, and the rest of my time is mainly research and some administrative work and teaching. I run the clinical trials program for the Vancouver Stroke Program, and I do research of my own, mainly focused on stroke in younger adults. We previously did a trial and registry on cerebral venous thrombosis, and more recently, I've been running a national study looking at brain health in adults and children with congenital heart disease.
Dr Berkowitz: Fantastic. Wow, that is a lot that you do, and we'll look forward to the results of some of those studies. So, when adults suffer a stroke, they typically present with sudden onset focal neurologic deficits, very common scenario we're consulted on. And one thing you and your colleague talk about in the article is that strokes can present differently in infants and in young children. Can you talk a little bit about the differing clinical presentations of stroke in the youngest young as compared to our usual experience treating the older adults?
Dr Field: Sure. So, you know, speaking about this as someone who doesn't see the children directly but has had the opportunity to discuss these patients with my colleagues and, like we all do, learn about it during our training, I think one of the distinctions, especially with neonates, is that it's generally not a presentation with focal neurologic deficits. Often these babies will have seizures or encephalopathy as their main presentation, and sometimes we're only finding out after the fact if they're presenting with developmental delay or early preference for handedness and hypotonia, things like that. So, in very young children, that's a distinction. And in older children, there can be sudden onset deficits and, and unfortunately, sometimes these are mistaken for other conditions that are more common in children, like seizures. But sometimes you can have a more indolent course, say, with something like a focal cerebral arteriopathy or something like that. So, it depends on the scenario, but the big difference primarily is in neonates, as far as I understand.
Dr Berkowitz: Perfect. That's very helpful. So as an adult neurologist, when I think about causes of stroke or teach sort of the categories of causes of stroke to our residents and students, when we think about the evaluation of stroke, I divide them broadly into causes related to the heart, causes related to the blood vessels, and causes related to the blood with, in the adult world, the most common things, of course, being atrial fibrillation for the heart, atherosclerosis for the blood vessels, and then risk factors for atherosclerosis in the blood, diabetes, hyperlipidemia, very rarely picking up a hypercoagulable disorder in the blood column. And reading your article, it seems that, correct me if I'm wrong, stroke in young adults, stroke in the pediatric population can basically be organized into those same broad categories, heart, blood vessels, and blood, just that there's many more conditions on the differential diagnosis that you would consider in young adults to begin with and then children and then neonates as we get into the younger and younger population. So, I'd like to talk about each of these sort of buckets of etiology in turn and ask you about some of the causes we would consider in young adults and children in each of these, and then as they come up, probably ask you more questions about how frequently we find these sorts of things, how frequently they're the cause of stroke treatment, et cetera. So, let's start with the heart. As I said, in adults, we're mostly looking for rhythm disorders, right, atrial fibrillation. Sometimes we'll pick up a patent foramen ovale or PFO or other structural abnormalities, but mostly we're thinking about atrial fibrillation. But reading your paper, I was struck by the huge variety of conditions that you might be looking for in the heart in children or infants with stroke. So, can you tell us a little more about cardiac etiologies of stroke in the young?
Dr Field: Yeah. So, I'd say unlike in older adults, where it tends more often to be a rhythm disorder, in children and adults who are younger, it's primarily a structural cause, and congenital heart disease being the most common. And it changes a little bit from younger adults shifting downwards in age to younger children in terms of the fact that often if we're seeing an adult with stroke related to congenital heart disease, it can be a paradoxical embolism from a previously undiagnosed PFO. Not in all cases, but fortunately this is improving over time. You know, generally people with diagnoses of more severe congenital heart disease are followed up from childhood and people are aware of the diagnosis, and hopefully they're being managed and watched for things like premature arrhythmias or depressed heart function or other things that can develop and require their own distinct antithrombotic management, for example. In young children, however, more severe causes of congenital heart disease tend to more frequently be associated with stroke. And in many cases, those strokes can be early on in life or associated, say, with perioperative complications or other iatrogenic-related causes in, in that way. Again, congenital heart disease can be associated with stroke at, at any point in the life course. But as adult neurologists, most frequently we're seeing very simple lesions like PFO with large shunts, and in children, it tends to be the more complex causes of congenital heart disease.
Dr Berkowitz: Got it. So, let's move on to the blood vessels. Again, in adults, we're usually thinking about atherosclerotic disease, be that of the cervical arteries or of the intracranial arteries. But in your paper, a lot of discussion about the various vasculopathies, arteriopathies that can be cause of stroke in younger adults and in children. Could you talk a little bit more about some of the vasculopathies and vascular conditions that are causes of stroke in the younger population?
Dr Field: Sure. Before I do that, I will say that especially in older younger adults, particularly over the age of thirty-five, and you know, kind of makes me shudder that that's an older younger adult. But, um, in, in any case, certainly conventional vascular risk factors are more common in this population with stroke, especially in those who don't have PFO-associated stroke. Like conventional atherosclerosis, you know, certainly is a cause of stroke in younger adults. But that being said, certainly other vascular causes and vasculopathy in particular is a much more common cause of stroke in younger adults and, and children than it is in older adults. In particular, dissection is an extremely common cause of stroke in younger adults. Generally cervical artery dissection from non-inflammatory vasculopathy, usually on, sometimes on the FMD fibromuscular dysplasia spectrum and, and sometimes, you know, provoked by minor trauma or something post-infectious that may make the vessels a little bit more susceptible. And in younger children, this inflammatory focal cerebral arteriopathy is a distinct cause that is a common cause of stroke in, in young children. There are other causes that can affect the blood vessels, you know, rarer things like vasculitis and vasculopathies that can develop in the context, say, of sickle cell anemia. But in general, as a bucket, vessels are still very important, but the pathology tends to shift.
Dr Berkowitz: Got it. And you, um, alluded to a point that I wanted to ask you about. You mentioned the sort of, there's stroke in the young, and then where do you draw the line at young? Less than sixty, less than thirty-five, and then we've also talked about strokes as young as before the age of birth. Yeah, I'm remembering, is it the Helsinki study, one of the early large series of stroke in younger individuals? I think that, was it eighteen to forty-nine in that or fifty-nine? I don't remember the exact age, but being struck reading that paper as a resident and thinking about the workup for exotic causes we do, right, and when a young patient has a stroke. And correct me if I'm wrong, the most common etiologies of stroke in that series, and I'm curious the other large series yourself have been involved with, have still been vascular risk factors and arrhythmias and things that we, even common, quote unquote, common things in the young, such as dissection or hypercoagulable states. Uh, the things that we sort of tend to think about first are actually less common. But acknowledging that that paper has folks up to the late forties when the vascular risk factors may be, um, unfortunately kicking in earlier, uh, and earlier due to dietary and lifestyle factors. So is that true, or do you have sort of an age cutoff when it's, we say stroke in the young, people sort of think, "Oh, they'd work someone up differently if they're less than sixty, and they have no vascular risk factors or few vascular risk factors." When do we start getting into the kind of younger population where atherosclerosis and cardiac arrhythmias are not number one and two?
Dr Field: I'd say first of all, you and I must have trained around the same time because I was also in my training, really struck by the results of the Helsinki study going, "Wow, I, I really didn't know how much of a role these conventional vascular risk factors still play." And I think we're seeing that information reiterated, unfortunately, like even with higher prevalences and more attributable risk in some of the newer series. There are newer European series looking at stroke in younger adults, and more recently, there's been one that we mentioned in the article from the Florida Stroke Registry. And it's true that generally the burden is in the older younger adults. But what I would say overall in terms of kind of how things guide the workup, you need to look at the patient and consider things. I mean, obviously you don't want to miss things that can be treated differently and identified by tests easily. You know, things like ruling out syphilis or antiphospholipid antibody disease in, in younger patients. You really want to make sure that that's not something that, that you'd miss because, you know, obviously your treatment is going to change. However, certainly we start with the basics for stroke workup in any patient that's coming in. At my center, CT angiography. Some centers it may be MR angiography and echocardiography. We take a careful history. We look at the blood work. We look at the vascular risk factor burden. We find out if there's kind of any worrisome personal history, family history, look at their general health context. I think that really helps to guide how far we go in a particular workup, and it also helps to direct the other investigations and types of follow-up we need to do. For example, if a patient has a fairly suspicious story for dissection, let's say they're getting over a cold, and they went to the gym, and, you know, there was a sudden movement that they did that really produced headache and neck pain, and there's an obvious cervical artery dissection. I'm not going to go too far down testing them for rare infections and doing advanced cardiac imaging unless something shows up on their initial echo, for example. But I will make an effort to do more detailed vascular imaging of the rest of their body, find out careful family history. If there's additional manifestations of a non-inflammatory vasculopathy elsewhere, say consider sending them to medical genetics, or obviously, if this is, you know, a second event, your flags raise even more. So, it really depends on the patient. If I find out that there's, you know, a family history of premature cardiac disease and things like that, you know, obviously we're gonna be keeping a close eye on their cholesterol, making sure that we're not identifying, for example, familial hypercholesterolemia, which is, you know, something that comes up not infrequently where we'll see an LDL in an untreated patient of more than five. I apologize, you're gonna have to do the conversion to American units on that. But there are things we identify and, you know, again, you don't want to fall solely on heuristics and your preconceived notion of, of the patient. You do have to consider the results of the investigations that you do order. But I think you can certainly be mindful in terms of how you direct your workup and in turn, how you direct your follow-up.
Dr Berkowitz: That's great to hear your approach. Yeah, as you said, our approach always begins with the same, coming back to these three categories, right? Doing some type of structural imaging of the heart, rhythm monitoring for the heart, and then vascular imaging of the head and neck. And then I was going to ask you, and you sort of began to answer this question. Yeah. What's next and how far do you go? I think most people think the expanded stroke workup in the young is at a minimum, a TEE if there's been no signal thus far on the original workup. I just mentioned and you spoke about, and then probably hypercoagulable testing and only sending arterial side if there's no shunt and venous and arterial side if there's a shunt. Is that your second pass approach or did I miss anything, or are there other nuances there that are helpful to discuss?
Dr Field: No, I think that's generally in keeping with what I do. I think with TEE being very important. I mean, the first pass are arterial stuff. Really, it's antiphospholipid antibodies and, and making sure there's no cancer. Like you said, only if there's a shunt do I pursue other venous hypercoagulability testing. Again, you [chuckles] kind of reiterate, go through with the history, make sure there's kind of no red flags. And sometimes, obviously, you do your best reasonable job with the first pass workup, and you will find out when someone presents with a second event that it's something very unexpected. Maybe first manifestation, someone with no obvious history and very initially normal-looking imaging, say with, with CATASL or something like Fabry's disease or something where you would consider it if there was kind of a more classical picture. But it wouldn't be something you would do kind of on your first or even second pass workup in the absence of any sort of clinical suspicion, family history, or something along those lines.
Dr Berkowitz: I'm curious just as far as rough percentage. I feel like many of these patients we see it's a patient who's young and who's had a stroke, and the initial first pass has been unremarkable, and we do our TEE, and we do our hypercoagulable workup. Again, antiphospholipid antibodies only if it's-- there's no shunt. And if there's a shunt, adding on some of the venous hypercoagulability protein C, protein S, factor five, Leiden, et cetera. A lot of the times I feel like we don't find anything. What's your sort of general gestalt? Again, as a general neurologist who does a lot of inpatient neurology, I feel like when these cases come up, it's not that common that you say, "Oh, I actually diagnosed protein S deficiency." Or every once in a while, diagnose an antiphospholipid antibody, or you'll find a PFO on TEE. You didn't find on TT. I've maybe found one fibroelastoma in many years. How often do you find something? How often is it just as an adult a cryptogenic stroke in a young adult or child?
Dr Field: So much of what we see is PFO-related, dissection-related, conventional vascular risk factor-related. We do send referrals to medical genetics. Sometimes we'll do testing for rare things like Fabry's or consider other diagnoses. But I mean, those tend to be the exceptions. About one in four to one in five young adults with stroke end up with this cryptogenic label. I like to keep them on my radar for a few reasons. I think, one, it produces tremendous anxiety for them to not have a cause of stroke identified and just to kind of have a generic approach to secondary prevention. So, I think just to kind of keep an eye on them, manage their anxieties each year, make sure there's kind of no updates in, in terms of general secondary preventionAnd sometimes just things dawn on you later or there are new conditions, say things like, you know, DADA2, this, you know, adenosine deaminase deficiency. You know, there are new diagnoses that, that come on the radar. And sometimes treatments change. You know, for example, when I was starting my early career, the evidence hadn't yet been in place for PFO closure, and then all of a sudden, the paradigm completely changed. And you want to make sure that you can get in touch with those patients to reconsider your approach at the time. So I realize that not everybody has the luxury of extended follow-up with their patients, but I think often you can kind of encourage them or their healthcare team or just, you know, patient themselves to keep in touch periodically just to make sure that there haven't been any changes in treatment paradigms or just with your own awareness of particular, you know, diagnoses or, or just kind of readdressing the situation, uh, a year after and seeing if there's anything that may have occurred to you in the interim.
Dr Berkowitz: Perfect. Really illuminating to hear your approach to these challenging cases. And as you said here and then a couple of times, I think, in this interview is in many of these cases it's your first pass, maybe even your second pass, you haven't found anything. And the key is, unfortunately, as distressing as it may be for the patient as well as for us to not have an answer, to just keep following these patients. And sometimes you really can't sort it out until something else happens, either neurologically or systemically, where you say, "Oh, that's what this was." But there would've been no way to know it from the first presentation. So, we've talked a lot about the diagnosis of causes of stroke in younger adults and children. And in the last minute or two here, I just wanted to talk a little bit about treatment. You mentioned early on that you're involved in thrombectomy cases in children. What's the state of evidence or at least state of practice in terms of offering therapies like thrombolysis and thrombectomy in our patient population? I guess it would be under 18, right, who is not studied in the major trials. Do we have evidence and, or in the absence of evidence, what's sort of the, the expert guidance on treating young adults under 18 and children with some of these acute therapies?
Dr Field: So, trying to keep up with the literature on this. You know, certainly the evidence has been more established in a small trial and pediatric registries for use of tPA, tissue plasminogen activator, in children just because, you know, it's been around much longer. In terms of tenecteplase, which I, I really think signifies a, a practice shift in adult stroke because of its, you know, non-inferior efficacy and ease of use and potentially better rates of recanalization over time. In children, to my knowledge, that evidence base is, is limited to case series and anecdotal shifts in availability of drug and, and different practices. So, the evidence base is not particularly strong for tenecteplase in children who are identified within a reasonable amount of time who are still otherwise candidates for thrombolysis, you know, thrombolysis in children. Children who are a little bit older, I think, can't remember the exact age, but generally very young, like neonates, children who are under the age of two, I believe. I would want to double-check that thrombolysis is less commonly used and just because the safety has not really been that well-established. And for thrombectomy, it's now recommended to use thrombectomy in otherwise eligible children in the newest AHA guidelines. It gets a little bit more controversial in very young children. Under the age of six, there's less of an evidence base and, and often it will depend on people's level of comfort in terms of the size of the arteries. It's my understanding that once you get to about age six, the artery diameter is similar to that in fully grown people. But in younger children, I think just because of the catheters, there can be risk of, of injury. So, it's more of a case-by-case conversation with your interventionalist for younger children. And again, the evidence to intervene is not there for very, very young babies, for example.
Dr Berkowitz: That's very helpful to hear the current state of the evidence and the current state of practice, acknowledging, of course, there's not that much evidence, and these are relatively uncommon occurrences, fortunately, for children, but making it challenging for practitioners and practices may, um, vary based on different institutional protocols. So again, today I've been interviewing Dr. Thalia Field about her article on stroke in children and younger adults. This article appears in the June 2026 Continuum issue on cerebrovascular disease. Be sure to check out Continuum Audio episodes from this and other issues. And thank you to our listeners for joining us today.
Dr Monteith: This is Dr. Teshamae Monteith, Associate Editor of Continuum Audio. If you've enjoyed this episode, you'll love the journal, which is full of in-depth and clinically relevant information important for neurology practitioners. Use the link in the episode notes to learn more and subscribe. AAN members, you can get CME for listening to this interview by completing the evaluation at continpub.com/audioCME. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio.