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Obesity linked to strokes in women

Stroke rates among women in their late 30s to early 50s have tripled over the past two decades and researchers suspect a parallel rise in obesity may be playing a role.

"The alarming increase in obesity among middle-aged women may point to an important modifiable reason that stroke could be on the rise," Dr Ralph Sacco, chairman of neurology at the University of Miami, Florida, who was not involved in the study, told Reuters Health in an email.

In a previous analysis of US stroke data from 1999 to 2004, researchers found that 45- to 54-year-old women were more than twice as likely as similarly aged men to suffer a stroke.

Dig deeper

This prompted Dr Amytis Towfighi and colleagues of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles to dig deeper to see if this represented a real trend and, if so, whether they could uncover any explanations.

They looked to data on about 10,000 men and women aged 35 to 54 from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys. Information was collected from representative slices of the U.S. population in two waves: 1988 through 1994 and 1999 through 2004.

The researchers found no significant difference in stroke rates between the sexes during the first time period: 0.9% for men and 0.6% for women. However, a difference arose during the later period, when the number of women who reported suffering a stroke jumped to 1.8%, while the rate among men stayed the same.

This finding challenges the traditional thinking that men have similar or higher stroke rates compared to their female counterparts, the researchers point out in the journal Stroke.

Obesity common in risk group

In trying to decipher what may have contributed to the upward trend in stroke among women, they saw that women in the second wave were more likely to be obese, as well as have high blood pressure and high levels of harmful blood fats called triglycerides, compared to women in the first wave.

More of the women in the later time period were also on blood pressure and lipid-lowering medications, reflecting improved efforts to control stroke risk factors in recent years.

"The obesity epidemic is likely counteracting many of the advances in stroke preventive measures," Towfighi told Reuters Health.

Her advice for preventing stroke centres on a basic healthy lifestyle: exercise regularly, maintain a healthy weight, eat fruits and vegetables, abstain from smoking, and drink alcohol in moderation.

Sacco, who is president-elect of the American Heart Association (AHA), agrees. "It is never too late to start eating right and increasing physical activity in our daily routine," he said. - (Lynne Peeples/Reuters Health, June 2010)

SOURCE: http://link.reuters.com/vub93m Stroke, online May 27, 2010.

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