Healthier lifestyles may reduce women’s stroke risk

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Women who abstain from smoking, drink alcohol moderately, exercise regularly, maintain a healthy weight for their height and eat a healthy diet are less likely to experience a particular type of stroke than those with less healthy lifestyles, new study findings indicate.

“Our findings underscore the importance of healthy behaviors in the prevention of stroke,” Dr. Tobias Kurth, of Brigham and Woman’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and colleagues write in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

“The benefit depends on the stroke subtype,” Kurth told Reuters Health. “We observed a beneficial effect on ischemic stroke, the most common form of stroke, but not on Hemorrhagic stroke.”

Ischemic stroke results from a blockage of an artery supplying blood to the brain, whereas a Hemorrhagic stroke occurs when a blood vessel breaks and causes bleeding into the brain.

Almost a quarter of the approximately 700,000 strokes that occur each year end in death and a similar proportion result in permanent disability. Kurth and colleagues looked at lifestyle factors that may play a role in the prevention of stroke. Several factors such as smoking, exercise and body weight have been studied individually, but not in combination.

The researchers analyzed data on 37,636 women, aged 45 years and older, from the Women’s Health Study. During an average 10 years of follow-up, a total of 450 strokes occurred among the women. The majority of strokes experienced were ischemic.

Women with the healthiest lifestyles, based on their scores on a health index that took smoking, drinking, exercise, body mass index and diet into consideration, were 55 percent less likely to experience a stroke than those with the lowest health index scores, the researchers report.

These healthiest women, who comprised five percent of the study group, were 71 percent less likely to experience an ischemic stroke but no such beneficial effect was seen for Hemorrhagic stroke.

The reduced risk of stroke from a healthy lifestyle was evident among women of all ages, the researchers note, and the benefit remained apparent even after taking into account various biological factors that may otherwise have contributed to the women’s risk of stroke, such as a history of High Blood Pressure, diabetes, and High cholesterol.

In light of the findings, “simple lifestyle modification may help to reduce the risk of stroke,” Kurth told Reuters Health.

SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, July 10, 2006.

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