This Christ-centered blog is designed to serve stroke survivors, families and friends, through sharing experience and faith. My own stroke came on May 8, 1998. God provided medical professionals, friends, fellow believers, and strength to get me through some struggling recovery times.
The incidence of stroke has declined in recent years, but only in men.
Researchers studied stroke incidence in four periods from 1993 to 2010 in five counties in Ohio and Kentucky. There were 7,710 strokes all together, 57.2 percent of them in women. ...
No one knows why there has been no improvement in women, but the lead author, Dr. Tracy E. Madsen, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Brown, said that some risk factors have a stronger effect in women than in men. Risk factors for stroke include high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes and smoking.
You can read my story here and an update here. But in a nutshell, I wound up in the right place and the right time when my stroke occurred back in 1998, two years after tissue plasminogen activator was approved for stroke patients - a Southern community hospital, of all places.
The findings come from a report published Wednesday in the journal Neurology. Researchers found stroke patients living in the Northeast states had more than twice the odds of receiving tPA — a powerful anti-coagulant that can break up the clot causing the stroke — than those living in the Midwest and the South.
Stroke risk is lower for healthy older adults with blood pressure under 140 mm Hg than in the disputed 140 to 149 mm Hg range, particularly for minorities and women, according to a cohort study.
In the prospective population-based Northern Manhattan Study cohort of 1,750 people 60 and older, and free of stroke, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease (CKD) at baseline, the adjusted odds of incident stroke over a median 13 years of annual follow-up were a significant 70% higher with a systolic blood pressure of 140 to 149 mm Hg than with lower blood pressures.
The study is among the first to examine long-term outcomes in younger women who are heart attack or stroke survivors, co-author Bob Siegerink, PhD, of Leiden and the Center for Stroke Research Berlin, told MedPage Today in an email exchange.
Stroke prevention becomes even more important when an additional risk factor looms. Recent research about post-traumatic stress disorder reveals that PTSD and trauma may raise women's stroke risks:
For women with severe PTSD, the study found a 60 percent higher risk of heart attack or stroke compared to women who hadn't experienced any trauma. The risk was increased 45 percent for women who experienced a traumatic event but didn't develop PTSD, the researchers added.
"Our study is the first to look at trauma exposure and PTSD symptoms and new cases of cardiovascular disease in a general population sample of women," said lead researcher Jennifer Sumner, an epidemiologist at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health in New York City.
It's important to note, however, that while this study found an association between trauma and a higher risk of stroke and heart attack, it wasn't designed to prove a cause-and-effect relationship. It's possible that other factors may explain the increased risk.
"It is very important that there is a specific stroke prevention guideline for women because we're not the same as 50% of the population," Dolora Wisco, MD, a neurologist at the Cleveland Clinic, told MedPage Today. "We have our own risk factors on top of the ones that are commonly seen out there."
Women are disproportionately affected by stroke; of an estimated 6.8 million people living in the U.S. after surviving a stroke, 3.8 million are women. In addition, stroke is the fifth leading cause of death for men, but third for women.
Read the article for some of the differences and review the guidelines, which focuses on stroke prevention.
Among patients presenting with an acute stroke, women were less likely than men to receive intravenous thrombolytic therapy, which could have to do with delayed arrival at the hospital, researchers found.
Read through the entire article; another argument that speedy response to stroke signs are vital.
I've espoused exercise for years. Now, new research added more strength to the argument for exercise, especially among women. This story reports that walking is linked to fewer strokes in women:
Past studies have also linked physical activity to fewer strokes, which can be caused by built-up plaque in arteries or ruptured blood vessels in the brain.
... Women who walked briskly for 210 minutes or more per week had a lower stroke risk than inactive women but also lower than those who cycled and did other higher-intensity workouts for a shorter amount of time.
Be sure to click on the link above and check out the whole story.
Walking is cheap and easy exercise for most, and is a great way to start an exercise regimen. You can start at the distance, time and speed that is comfortable, and move from there. And as always, if you're starting an exercise program, check with your health professional first!
...[T]he increase did not appear to come at the expense of the number of patients treated in the earlier period up to 3 hours after onset, something investigators had feared would happen once physicians knew they had more time to decide whether to treat.
Patients treated later had similar functional outcomes to the earlier window, the researchers found; there was a small increase in symptomatic intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) and death but not enough to prevent use of the treatment, the researchers conclude.
"Women need to be treated for stroke as soon as possible. We found that women who weren't treated had a worse quality of life after stroke than men. However, the good news is that women who were treated responded just as well as men to the treatment," study author Dr. Michael D. Hill, of the University of Calgary in Canada, said in a news release from the journal's publisher.
Hill and his colleagues analyzed data on more than 2,100 stroke patients. Of the 232 patients treated with tPA within three hours after their stroke, 44 percent were women.
Only 58 percent of women who didn't receive tPA had a good outcome six months after their stroke, compared with 70 percent of men who weren't given the drug. Women and men treated with tPA after their stroke had similar outcomes.
The findings are based on a study of the exercising habits of 39,315 female health professionals whose average age was 54. It found that:
* Women who walked at a pace of 3 miles per hour or faster had a 37% lower risk of suffering any type of stroke.
* Women who walked two or more hours a week had a 30% reduced risk of any type of stroke.
“Physical activity, including regular walking, is an important modifiable behavior for stroke prevention,” Jacob R. Sattelmair, MSc, of the Harvard School of Public Health, says in a news release. “Physical activity is essential to promoting cardiovascular health and reducing risk of cardiovascular disease, and walking is one way of achieving physical activity.”
Caregivers are important for stroke survivors, especially those who suffer depression post-stroke. According to this recent study, this effects women more than men:
Brittany Poynter, M.D., and colleagues from the University of Toronto looked at 56 studies on stroke and depression comprising more than 75,000 people, about 12,000 of them women. The time between the stroke and onset of depression ranged from less than two weeks to 15 years.
In women, rates of post-stroke depression ranged from about 6 percent to 78 percent, while in men depression rates ranged from 4.7 percent to about 65 percent.
These findings are important, Poynter said, because women who have had a stroke generally do more poorly than men. They tend to have higher rates of disability and longer hospitalization times. The authors say this might be due in part to higher rates of depression. In addition, “women may have less access to care,” Poynter said.
Women are 30 percent less likely than men to receive a critical clot-busting drug than can limit brain damage after a stroke, according to a Michigan State University study.
The study findings were presented Feb. 19 in San Diego at the International Stroke Conference, organized by the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association.
Tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, first approved as a treatment in the mid-1990s, is a potent blood thinner used to dissolve artery-clogging clots, which cause most strokes. As part of its study, a team of MSU researchers reviewed all stroke studies published between 1995 and March 2008 that presented data on tPA treatment rates. Eighteen studies provided data on more than 2.3 million patients.
A recent posting mentioned that stroke symptoms are often missed for the under-55 crowd. My stroke occurred at age 39 and fortunately, it was recognized. Still, it's clear that people who do not fit in the mold of a classic stroke patient - elderly male - need help, too.
This shows further evidence that if you even think you might be having a stroke, call 911, get somewhere and get a satisfactory answer. And if you are getting someone else to an emergency room, you might have to be that person's advocate for proper care.
So learn stroke signs. Don't hesitate. Waiting might be fatal.
* Only seven of 37 women (19%) with irregular heart rhythm and 11 of 71 (15%) with known heart disease identified these conditions as risk factors for stroke.
* Just 3% of the women surveyed correctly identified irregular heart rhythm as a stroke risk factor; 16% identified heart disease and 36% identified diabetes as risk factors.
* Two-thirds of the women considered their health to be good or excellent; about 70% said they rarely or never worried about stroke.
