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 Stroke causes one out of every 20 deaths in the U.S., killing nearly
130,000 people each year.
In a mini-stroke, known technically as a transient ischemic attack (TIA),
blood flow to the brain is only blocked for a short time, usually
less than five minutes, according to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention.
Signs of a TIA can include face drooping, arm weakness, sudden
confusion, trouble speaking or understanding, sudden trouble seeing
in one or both eyes, sudden trouble walking, dizziness, lack of
balance or coordination, or sudden severe headache with no known
cause.
More than a third of people who have a mini-stroke end up having a
major stroke within the year if they don’t receive treatment.
The American Stroke Association warns on its website that a
mini-stroke “is more accurately characterized as a ‘warning stroke,’
a warning you should take very seriously.”
“A great many people who have (mini-strokes or TIAs) don’t seek
medical attention, and don’t feel that it’s an emergency,” said lead
author Peter Rothwell of the Stroke Prevention Research Unit in the
Nuffield Department of Clinical Neuroscience at John Radcliffe
Hospital in Oxford in the U.K.
But seeking medical attention is incredibly useful, he said.
Previous studies found that the risk of major stroke in the days
after mini-stroke is greatly reduced with an intensive drug
cocktail, but it was not clear if the benefit came from aspirin or
other drugs, Rothwell told Reuters Health by phone.
The researchers analyzed data pooled from more than 15,000
participants in 12 trials comparing aspirin to no aspirin treatment
after mini-stroke. Taking aspirin reduced the risk of a recurrent
stroke in the following six weeks by about 60 percent and the risk
of disabling or fatal stroke was reduced even further, regardless of
dose or patient age, they reported in The Lancet.
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Without treatment, mini-stroke may be followed by major stroke in 5
percent of cases within two days, 10 percent within a week, and 15
percent within a month, said professor Graeme Hankey of The
University of Western Australia, who wrote an accompanying
commentary in the journal.
“Aspirin reduces the aggregation of platelets, and hence helps
prevent the formation of blood clots that may arise on
ruptured/eroded atherosclerotic plaques in arteries supplying blood
to the brain, and prevent the clots blocking the artery, or breaking
away and (traveling) down stream to block a smaller artery in the
brain, and cause a stroke,” Hankey told Reuters Health by email.
As with a heart attack, if you feel any symptoms of stroke or
mini-stroke, like weakness on one side of the body, vision problems
or slurred speech, you should call 911 and take an aspirin, Rothwell
said.
“Even though the recommendation is there for heart attack, the
benefit for TIA and stroke is much larger,” he said.
If a TIA patient does seek treatment, “often they see someone
relatively junior in the emergency department or a family doctor,
get referred on for a specialist opinion and quite often are not
given aspirin,” he said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1NA7BS0 The Lancet, online May 18, 2016.
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