Prevent Stroke with Information at Hand

As if women between the ages of 35-54 didn’t have enough to worry about, now a recent article in Newsweek indicates that the proportion of women between those ages having strokes has nearly tripled in the last decade. That is a very alarming statistic!

OK, so why? What has changed? Are women suddenly different now than they were 10 years ago? My answer is, “I’m not sure” to all three questions. I do know that our lives have changed significantly over the past decade.

Consider these questions based on how things were 10 years ago: Could you put your cell phone (if you had one) in the front pocket of your jeans and have nobody notice? Could you sit at the breakfast table and reply to e-mail from work on your day off so you wouldn't be too busy when you got back? Did you know what trans-fat was? Did you even think that women had strokes at 40 years old? If you are like me, you probably answered no to all of these questions.

Clearly life is different now than it was then. It makes sense that changes in our lives make us a bit different too. Science has done a great job of pointing out that women are having strokes three times as often as they were a decade ago, but science has not really been able to say exactly why.

Until those answers are available, the one way to protect yourself is to maximize your knowledge while minimizing your risk. That includes knowing the signs and symptoms of a stroke:

1) Sudden numbness or weakness, typically on one side of the body
2) Sudden difficulty speaking
3) Sudden headache
4) Sudden blurry vision
5) Sudden dizziness, or difficulty with balance or coordination

(Other tests of a possible stroke include an inability to form a smile or raise both arms above the head.)

Minimize your risk by: quitting smoking (especially if you are on birth control pills); controlling high blood pressure, cholesterol levels and diabetes; lowering your body mass index (BMI) and reducing waist circumferences, both of which have been linked to increased risk.

Many things in life are unavoidable but together we can make some of them preventable.

--John Romano, RN, BSN
Director of Medical Surgical and Neuroscience