Stroke prevention and therapy awareness in a large sample of high school students: results of an educational campaign in the Northern-Western Italy.

BACKGROUND: People often ignore the usefulness of stroke prevention, the typical onset symptoms, and the efficacy of the new therapies. In order to attempt to correct this situation, we performed a wide educational campaign addressed to students of high schools in Liguria and Piedmont Italian regions. METHOD: The campaign consisted in two phases: (1) compilation of a simple questionnaire on stroke, followed by a scientific lecture on the disease, distribution of didactic materials, and final open discussion; (2) re-filling and sending by participants of the same questionnaire for the statistical evaluation of the improvement of stroke awareness. RESULTS: The global initial percentage of wrong answers (number of subjects 2,264) was 33.4%: (A) stroke general knowledge 23.5%, (B) stroke risk factors 37.6%, (C) stroke early symptoms 34.1%). At the end of the campaign, the total percentage of wrong answers (number of subjects 1883) attained the 11.4%.: (A) stroke general knowledge 3.7%, (B) stroke risk factors 11.7%, (C) stroke early symptoms 12.5%). All these differences were strongly significant. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: We demonstrated that our educational campaign obtained an important improvement of stroke awareness in our sample. Girl students, Lyceum students, and less young students attained significant better knowledge improvement. We hope that the enhanced awareness might induce a more frequent diffusion of prevention strategies, an increased capacity of recognizing onset stroke symptoms with shortening of patients' presentation in the emergency room of the hospitals when they can undergo reperfusion treatments.