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.
