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 In recent years, medication advances have helped cut health risks in
the year following a stroke, but after that the risk of a second
stroke or dementia remains elevated for at least five years, said
senior author Dr. M. Arfan Ikram from Erasmus University Medical
Center in Rotterdam.
“As more stroke patients survive in the short term, automatically
more patients survive into the long term,” Ikram told Reuters
Health.
Risk factors earlier in life may cause irreversible damage before
the initial stroke, so making lifestyle changes to prevent a second
stroke might be too late, Ikram and his coauthors write in the
journal Stroke.
The researchers followed about 1,200 patients over age 45 who had
suffered a first stroke and almost 5,000 similar people who had not
suffered a stroke
After a year of recovery, stroke survivors were about three times as
likely as others to have another stroke and twice as likely to
develop dementia.
For stroke survivors, having high blood pressure, diabetes, low
levels of good cholesterol or smoking earlier in life accounted for
almost 40 percent of the risk for second strokes and 10 percent of
risk for post-stroke dementia, according to the analysis.
Unlike a condition such as cancer, where if you undergo treatment
successfully and survive ten years we might say “you battled it,
you’re cured,” increased health risks remain after a stroke, Ikram
said. This shouldn’t be discouraging, but should encourage people
before or after stroke to do what they can to prevent another, he
said.
“Once you suffer a stroke, treatment shifts toward medication and
simple preventive measures are pushed to the background,” Ikram
said. “Don’t neglect the simple things like quitting smoking,
exercising more and controlling blood pressure.”
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Measures to prevent first and second strokes seem to be similar, he
said.
“This study suggests that risk factors that lead to the initial
stroke may also predispose patients to worsening mental and physical
health after stroke,” he said in a statement. “This also applies to
risk of death after stroke.”
In a previous study, 27 percent of all deaths after stroke were
attributable to risk factors already present before stroke, he said.
Useful preventive measures before a stroke, like maintaining a
healthy weight, being active and not smoking, also help to prevent a
host of other health issues, Ikram noted.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/29PUaeG Stroke, online July 14, 2016.
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