Another set of stroke prevention stories

I've been running across more and more stroke prevention stories. Here are two recent ones:

Vitamin, diet link to stroke risk assessed

In a review, neither antioxidant vitamins nor B-vitamins were associated with stroke prevention, but a healthy diet, such as the Mediterranean diet, did appear to diminish risk, Graeme Hankey, MD, of Royal Perth Hospital in Australia, reported in The Lancet.

"The overall quality of an individual's diet and balance between energy intake and expenditure seem to be more important determinants of stroke risk than individual nutrients and foods," he wrote.

Hankey reviewed the literature on individual vitamins, nutrients, foods, and overall diets and their effects on stroke risk.

Stroke risk reduced with treatment of prehypertension

Patients with prehypertension who take blood-pressure-lowering therapy have a highly statistically significant 22% reduced risk of stroke, a new meta-analysis shows. The study is published online December 8, 2011, in Stroke.

The reduction in stroke risk observed in the study was "clear-cut," "clinically meaningful," and evident among all classes of antihypertensive drugs studied, said lead author Dr Ilke Sipahi (Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH).

"We saw it with ACE inhibitors, we saw it with calcium-channel blockers [CCBs], and we saw it with angiotensin-receptor blockers [ARBs] to a certain extent," Sipahi said in an interview. "So this is a true finding; the risk is truly reduced."

But the study results should not change current recommendations regarding blood-pressure-lowering therapy, said Sipahi. "It's not realistic to go ahead and recommend antihypertensive therapy to every single patient with prehypertensive blood-pressure levels, but I think our findings have to be discussed extensively within the medical community."