Better on stroke
From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.
A study indicates we’ve been lowering our stroke risks. At Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, researcher Josef Coresh looked at data on about 15,800 people. He says the rate of first strokes fell about 2-fold from 1987 to the end of 2011, with a 40 percent drop in deaths.
Coresh says better control of high blood pressure or hypertension, less smoking, and wide use of statin drugs to control cholesterol contributed to the drop. And he says:
“If people really had optimal lifestyle behaviors, I think the rates of hypertension and stroke could be decreased substantially – maybe even by 2-fold more.”
The study in the Journal of the American Medical Association was supported by the National Institutes of Health.
Learn more at healthfinder.gov.
HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.