WASHINGTON, Jan 6: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has suffered the worst type of stroke, leaving him with a poor chance of survival and hardly any hope of making a full recovery, experts said on Thursday.

Surgeons at Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital said they had staunched the bleeding in the 77-year-old leader’s brain after he suffered a hemorrhagic stroke. He was in critical but stable condition, heavily sedated and on a respirator.

“This is the deadliest and most disabling form of stroke that we face,” Dr. Stephan Mayer, associate professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Columbia University Medical Centre in New York, said in a telephone interview.

Dr Ross Bogey of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago said Sharon would suffer significant impairments if he survived.

“He won’t be able to do his job,” Bogey said.

“It is going to be interesting to see if he recovers consciousness in the short term.”

Mr Sharon, considerably overweight, suffered a minor ischemic stroke last month. An ischemic stroke is the most common type of stroke, caused by a clot blocking blood flow to the brain.

He was on blood-thinning medication to prevent another ischemic stroke, but that put him at higher risk of the hemorrhagic stroke that followed, experts agreed. In a hemorrhagic stroke, blood pours into the brain, causing the brain tissue to swell and killing brain cells.

“If you see a picture of the brain with a haemorrhage in it, that is all you need to see,” Dr Mayer said.

“It rips apart the brain. It damages the brain cells and brain tissue for a radius of several centimetres around the haematoma,” he said, referring to immediate area of bleeding.

DISABILITY FEARED: “I suspect that his thinking abilities are diminished. Memory is also probably impaired,” Dr Bogey said in a telephone interview.