Aging gracefully - or at least while sleeping - might be important

Sleep well?

I must admit that the older I get, the more often I wake up in the middle of the night. Thankfully, I usually go right back to sleep after a small excursion.

Still, measuring sleep quality, especially for seniors, might important information in managing one's stroke risk. Recent research suggests that for seniors, poor sleep may mean higher stroke risk:

Researchers examined the autopsied brains of 315 people, average age 90, who had undergone at least one full week of sleep quality assessment before their death. Twenty-nine percent of them had suffered a stroke, and 61 percent had moderate-to-severe damage to blood vessels in the brain.

Aging with migraine? Smoking seems to add a major stroke risk

Smoking, as mentioned here before, is bad for you. Really bad for you.

So check out this news about smoking, migraines and strokes - older smokers with migraines may face added stroke risk:

Photo: free photos via Flickr

The researchers did not find an association between migraine and the risk of either heart attack or stroke in nonsmokers. But among smokers, migraine was associated with a threefold increased risk of stroke.

However, even though the study found an association between migraine and stroke risk in smokers, it did not prove a cause-and-effect relationship.

Time for younger set to start taking care

Once again, we're seeing more concerns about young people and stroke risk. for older people, the rate of stroke is declining. For people younger, there seems to be trouble. Read this article how stroke incidence is down and survival up -- for some:

These stroke incidence data appear to reflect both positive and negative trends in stroke prevention and treatment over the last few decades, Koton said.

Photo from U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention

On the plus side, increased use of statins and hypertension medications and a dramatic decline in smoking may largely explain the lower stroke rate among people over the age of 65, while the rise in obesity and diabetes in younger adults could explain the lack of progress in reducing stroke incidence in younger adults, Koton told MedPage Today.

"More younger adults are obese, and when obesity increases so does hypertension and diabetes," she said. "Hypertension is the main risk factor for stroke. I think this is a warning sign for us to take these risk factors as seriously in younger people as we do in older people."

Yes - time for ALL ages to take stroke risk factors SERIOUSLY.