A healthy lifestyle - which includes not smoking, eating a low-fat diet with plenty of fruits and vegetables, exercising, and maintaining a healthy body weight - may help prevent a first-time stroke. That’s according to the American Heart Association, whose revised guidelines say such healthy behaviors reduce the risk for stroke by as much as 80%. In addition to a healthy lifestyle, authors of the guidelines say primary care visits and emergency room visits provide a major opportunity to intervene and reduce the risk of stroke. Emergency room physicians could identify people at risk, particularly patients with diabetes, asymptomatic high blood pressure, or atrial fibrillation, and make recommendations to help prevent a first-time stroke, they say. “Stroke remains a major health care problem,” Larry B. Goldstein, MD, has written in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.
In the United States, stroke death rates have declined by more than a third between 1999 and 2006; however, stroke remains the third leading cause of death after cardiovascular disease and cancer. The authors note that although stroke was once considered to be a condition of the elderly, the number of pediatric stroke cases has risen in recent years.
More than 77% of the 795,000 strokes in the U.S. are first-time events; there are 6.4 million stroke survivors in the U.S. Twenty percent of stroke survivors are so functionally impaired that they require institutional care.