Stroke: Types, Recognition, Diagnosis, Treatment

Definition and WHO time-based criteria

The World Health Organization (WHO) defined a stroke as a “neurological deficit of cerebrovascular cause that persists beyond 24 hours or is interrupted by death within 24 hours.” This time-based criterion was intended to reflect the (then-assumed) reversibility of tissue damage and uses an arbitrary 24-hour cutoff to distinguish stroke from related syndromes. Under this WHO framework, symptoms lasting less than 24 hours indicate a transient ischemic attack (TIA), often called a “mini-stroke,” because the neurological deficits resolve completely within that period. The definition emphasizes that the duration of neurological impairment is central to classification, particularly in separating true stroke from transient events.

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Ischemic stroke overview

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