(Reuters Health) – Excess weight increases stroke risk, a new study including nearly 2.3 million people confirms. And the heavier a person is, the greater their risk.
“Being obese (but indeed even just overweight) puts an individual at significantly higher risk of ischemic stroke, with a serious possibility of permanent disability and reduced life expectancy,” Dr. Pasquale Strazzullo of Frederico II University of Naples Medical School in Naples, Italy, one of the study’s authors, told Reuters Health.
Ischemic strokes occur when blood vessels supplying the brain are blocked. Hemorrhagic strokes, caused by bleeding in the brain, are less common.
While being overweight increases a person’s likelihood of having stroke risk factors such as high blood pressure, the question of whether being overweight or obese directly ups stroke risk has not been answered adequately; evidence from past research has been “controversial,” Strazzullo noted.
To investigate, he and his colleagues searched the medical literature for studies with at least four years of follow-up that looked at stroke risk based on body mass index, or BMI, a standard measure of weight in relation to height used to gauge how fat or thin a person is. They found 25 studies including 2,274,961 people, who had a total of 30,757 strokes.
People who were overweight were 22 percent more likely to suffer an ischemic stroke than normal weight people, while the risk for obese people was 64 percent higher, the researchers found. Hemorrhagic stroke risk wasn’t higher for overweight people, but it was 24 percent higher for obese people.
A person’s risk of having a stroke within the next 10 years can be estimated based on their gender, blood pressure, whether or not they smoke, and whether or not they have diabetes, Strazullo explained.
(3 votes, average: 3.33 out of 5)
Loading ...
Loading ...
Nothing really new about these research conclusions, but always very valid info that needs to be corroborated periodically to reinforce findings. Hopefully the general public is ‘wising up’ and implementing intervention strategies to decrease their mortality rates.
Of all the above noted contributing factors, inhaling the byproducts of any form of combustion, specifically one that contains many known carcinogens and hundreds of harmful chemical, and has been repeatedly cited for triggering cancers – smoking cigarettes and cigars is simply foolish. Obesity conjoined with factors of heredity are sufficiently difficult to control. Is it cool amongst your peers to have cancer ?