A new study of people age 19 to 49 found chronic stress can increase a young woman’s risk of stroke. And even moderate stress increases risk of stroke by 78% in women - but not in men.
KERA’s Sam Baker talked about this withDr. Claudia Perez, a neurointensivist with Texas Health Fort Worth. She said the result came out of a study into cryptogenic stroke.
Cryptogenic stroke is one where we don't see those associated changes in the blood vessels going up to the brain or changes in the heart, and we don't have a clear smoking gun for why this stroke happened.
This is a particular type of stroke that we tend to see in younger patients. And what they wanted to look at was, what is it that's different, that's driving the stroke.
What they found was an increased reporting of stroke in these patients. Some of the things that might be going on here are things like, are these patients perceiving stroke more often than other people in the population? And then what are the mechanisms by which stress can lead to stroke.
So this may mean things like increased risk for inflammation and changes over time that lead to stroke.
Why would stress have this much impact on younger women?
Some of the things that were potential explanations for why maybe women were having higher self-perceived stress could be things like societal and psychological factors. Maybe there's more chronic stress in women because many times they're trying to juggle multiple roles, such as working family and caregiving.
But why would this not affect men the same way it does women?
The scale that was used here was asking people not at the time of your stroke, but a month before the stroke happened: How stressed were you at that point?
And so one of the questions is, did men underreport the amount of stress that they were feeling compared to women who may have reported it more often?
And why do you suppose men have a tendency to under report stress? Is that just how we're raised to behave?
I think that one of the questions. Is it just part of societal conditioning that men or in other studies are more likely to underreport stress than women?
We're not supposed to admit to being stressed or something like that.
Yeah. So sometimes that's mitigated by assuming other unhealthy habits, such as heavy alcohol consumption, which also increases your risk of stroke.
So the overall finding was that in patients between 19 to 49 years old who were having strokes, overall, we saw a higher incidence of stroke in both men and women, but the correlation between stress itself was higher in the women.
This study raises a lot of interesting points, but not necessarily a lot of answers.
That is part of the work that will need to be done in future studies, because once again, this specific type of stroke is not one where we're seeing obvious changes in the heart. We're not seeing obvious changes in the blood vessels going up to the brain from long term diabetes, high blood pressure. This cryptogenic stroke is one where we don't know exactly how the stroke happened.
And so, the question here is what level of inflammation is a patient who lives with chronic stress undergoing. And what are those maybe micro changes that are going on in the blood vessels, in the inflammatory markers that are leading to an increased incidence of stroke whenever we're not finding that obvious lesion.
RESOURCES:
Stress, Stroke and Women study:
Chronic Stress Boosts Stroke Risk In Young Women
CDC: Preventing Stroke