Advanced stroke care coming to San Antonio’s far West Side

Time is brain.

Health care providers are taught this maxim to underscore the urgency in treating patients experiencing a stroke, during which blood flow to the brain is limited and nervous tissue rapidly lost. 

Every minute without treatment, 1.9 million neurons, 14 billion synapses and 7.5 miles worth of nerve fibers are destroyed, one 2006 research paper found, aging the brain by three and a half years every hour.

According to Dr. Ryan Morton, a neurologist who treats strokes and brain aneurysms, the Westover Hills community of San Antonio has in the past faced this race against time.

“These patients would come in where time is of the essence, and there’s no one there to help them,” Morton said. Before CHRISTUS Health expanded neurological care to its Westover Hills hospital, residents’ closest option for treatment was the South Texas Medical Center.

In 2023, CHRISTUS Health broke ground on a new four-story tower at its Westover Hills hospital that includes a neurological intensive care unit and neuroscience institute. And in October, the hospital unveiled a new imaging machine that helps doctors more quickly and accurately treat strokes and aneurysms.

CHRISTUS has also completed construction on an outpatient neurological clinic across from the hospital, which used to reside at CHRISTUS’ shuttered South Texas Medical Center hospital, which will soon become University Health’s Babcock Specialty Hospital.

The expansion in neurological care follows rapid population growth on San Antonio’s far west side.

“This part of San Antonio really desperately needed that sort of neurosurgical care,” said Morton, a San Antonio native and U.S. Army veteran, joined the hospital in August.

In October, CHRISTUS officials celebrated the addition of a Philips neuro biplane system, “basically a super fancy X-ray machine,” Morton said, the first of its kind on the West Side.

The imaging technology allows doctors to see super detailed and magnified images of the blood vessels in the head and neck, which is critical to quickly and accurately treat ischemic stroke, which occurs when a blood clot prevents oxygen from reaching the brain.

The images also help doctors pinpoint brain aneurysms, which are bulges on the wall of blood vessels that can lead to hemorrhagic stroke and brain bleeding if they burst. These bulges are small, on average about the size of a grain of rice, so the advanced resolution makes a big difference for doctors.

“Sometimes the anatomy isn’t very clear,” Morton explained. “With the particular system we bought, it should minimize those complications. It allows us to treat these problems safely, quickly and accurately, which wasn’t always available with previous iterations.”

According to University Health data, Bexar County residents face higher risks of stroke. The county’s stroke death rate for people age 35 and older was 88 per 100,000 people from 2018-2020, higher than the Texas average of 78 and U.S. average of 73. The risk factors for stroke correlate with many of the health problems San Antonio residents face at higher rates, like diabetes, obesity and hypertension.

“We definitely have a significantly higher incidence of ischemic stroke in South Texas,” Morton said. “If we can reduce the incidence of diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, the incidence of ischemic stroke will plummet as well.”

Nearly 50 million Americans live more than 60 minutes from advanced stroke care, a 2025 study in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Preventing Chronic Disease journal found. This group tends to be more rural, poorer and faces an array of other health challenges, the researchers found.

According to a 2022 University Health Bexar County health assessment, the near Eastside of San Antonio had the highest percentage (15%) of adults who reported experiencing a stroke. The near West Side had the second highest rate at 6.3%; the far West Side wasn’t included in the data.

Stroke survivors often face an array of neurological, cognitive, behavioral and physical challenges, the severity of which partially depends on how quickly they’re treated.

“The access to care to this part of town and being able to provide emergency services, particularly emergency neurologic services, is going to dramatically improve the outcomes of many diseases that otherwise would have had a very dismal outcome,” Morton added.