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Obese Women on the Pill at Stroke Risk

March 15, 2016 By Georgia Dawson Leave a Comment

Contraceptive pills may increase the risk of stroke for obese women

STATES CHRONICLE – Blood clots could be helpful as they prevent us from losing too much blood when we get a superficial scratch. However, if clots occur inside the body, in one of our veins, this could lead to a stroke called CVT (cerebral venous thrombosis).

According to a new study conducted by a team from the Academic Medical Centre from Amsterdam, the risk of CVT is higher in obese women who take oral contraceptives. Oral contraceptives have their own negative side effects which the doctor prescribing them usually tells you about.

There is the myth that contraceptive pills will make you fat and mess up with your hormones, which can happen if you don’t take them exactly as your doctor prescribed. Otherwise, their side-effects should be at a minimum.

Unfortunately, women who are overweight or obese are more likely to develop deep vein thrombosis, a blood clot which usually occurs in the leg as well as pulmonary embolism which, obviously, forms in the lungs. Knowing this, the researchers wanted to see whether birth-control pills could increase even more the risk of these women developing blood clots.

They started by studying 186 medical records of patients with CVT. It turned out that the patients were more likely to be young women using oral contraceptives. Besides, obesity was also an important factor to consider as it increases the risk of CVT in women who are on the pill.

Scientists managed to find that obese women on contraceptive pills were 30 times more likely to have a CVT. Moreover, they couldn’t find any link between obesity and CVT in women who didn’t use oral contraceptives, which suggests that the pills might really be at fault.

It was previously believed that the only contraceptives which could increase clot risk were the ones with estrogen. But scientists soon realized that estrogen is not the only substance responsible for blood clots. They found links between CVT and progestings which can also be found in contraceptive pills.

It is recommended that doctors give better counseling on the use of birth-control pills especially to obese women, informing them of the risks the pills can pose. Moreover, they could also recommend them some other contraceptive options which are not hormonal.

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Sleep Quality Is Important For the Health of Senior People

January 15, 2016 By James Faulkner Leave a Comment

The researchers discovered that there is a 30 percent risk of stroke in senior citizens that experience sleep distortions.

STATES CHRONICLE – A recent study conducted in Canada has revealed that sleep quality is important for the health of senior people. The researchers said that older citizens with bad sleeping habits are at risk for stroke or severe arteriosclerosis. It seems that the more interrupted the sleep pattern is, the higher the risks of arteriosclerosis or strokes are.

Assistant professor in the neurology department at the Toronto University and scientist and neurologist at the Toronto Sunnybrook Center for Health Sciences, Andrew Lim investigated alongside a team of other doctors the link between interrupted sleep patterns and strokes in the autopsied brains of 315 volunteers that participated in the Aging and Rush Memory Project.

All of the participants in the study were senior citizens that had an interrupted sleep pattern. It seems that in the case of the volunteers, there was an average disruption of sleep of up to seven times in a single hour. The participants (70 percent out of which were women) were monitored for at least a week before death. The autopsy of the brain revealed, in the majority of the cases, that they suffered from macroscopic infarcts, or strokes.

Out of 315 autopsies, the doctors concluded that 29% of the volunteers showed signs of a stroke, 61% presented evidence presented brain blood vessels damage that ranged from moderate to severe, It seems that the risk of such medical complications increases with an astonishing 27 percent when the patient experiences a disruption of the normal sleep cycle.

The percentages for developing severe arteriosclerosis were 27% higher in sleep deprived patients. The numbers only increase when it comes to macroscopic subcortical infarcts, 30 percent with every additional time the patient aroused during an average hour of sleep.

There was no conclusive evidence that tied interrupted sleep patterns to severe strokes. Doctor Lim explains that by saying that an acute stroke is composed out of a subset of manifests of pathological infarcts. Also macroscopic subcortical infarcts are easier to quantify, thus reducing the error margin

It seems that a fragmentation of the sleep pattern may cause the blood circulation to be impaired. This could lead to a number of health issues, amongst which we can find a chronic motor and cognitive impairment, and, yes, sleep deprivation.

Lim also adds that the sample on which the study was conducted is not broad enough in order to draw definitive conclusions. He states that the only certainty is that sleep quality is important for the health of senior people.

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Take Vitamin B to Check Heart Strokes: Study

September 20, 2013 By Janet Vasquez Leave a Comment

Vitamin B supplements are good for heart and can help in checking stroke, a new study has suggested.

The researchers at Zhengzhou University in China reviewed 14 clinical trials and found that the intake of Vitamin B lowered the risk of heart attacks overall by seven percent. However, its supplements did not appear to affect the severity of the strokes or the risk of death from a stroke, according to the study.

“Previous studies have conflicting findings regarding the use of vitamin B supplements and stroke or heart attack,” the author, Xu Yuming, said. “Some studies have even suggested that the supplements may increase the risk of these events.”

During the study, the researchers compared Vitamin B use with a placebo or a very low dose of B vitamin. 54,913 participants were followed for at least six months. The researchers found 2,471 strokes during the studies. All of the studies showed some benefit of taking vitamin B.

Folic acid, a supplemental form of folate or vitamin B9 that is often found in fortified cereals, appeared to reduce the effect of vitamin B. Researchers did not find a reduction in stroke risk for vitamin B12.

“Based on our results, the ability of vitamin B to reduce stroke risk may be influenced by a number of other factors such as the body’s absorption rate, the amount of folic acid or vitamin B12 concentration in the blood, and whether a person has kidney disease or high blood pressure,” Yuming said. “Before you begin taking any supplements, you should always talk to your doctor.”

The study was published in the online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

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