Tuesday, April 01, 2014

Most women miss most stroke signs

Stroke signs - too few people recognize them.

I'm guessing that men and women pretty much equally miss the signs in general. However, a recent study focused on just one sex and found that most stroke signs are unrecognized by most women:
Slightly more than half of the participants (51%) identified sudden one-sided weakness or numbness of the face or a limb as a stroke warning sign, but the rest of the warning signs were tagged by fewer than half, according to Heidi Mochari-Greenberger, PhD, MPH, of Columbia University Medical Center in New York City.
Those included difficulty speaking or understanding speech (identified by 44% overall but by a lower percentage in Hispanic versus white women), sudden severe headache (23%), unexplained dizziness (20%), and sudden loss of at least some vision (18%), she reported at the American Heart Association's Epidemiology and Prevention/Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Metabolism meeting in San Francisco.
I'd add that not every stroke has every sign. I never had a headache, for example. So even if one sign appears, get to help fast!

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