Posted on 02/09/2011 3:57:04 PM PST by jackspyder
Strokes are rising dramatically among young and middle-aged Americans while dropping in older people, a sign that the obesity epidemic may be starting to shift the age burden of the disease.
The numbers, reported Wednesday at an American Stroke Association conference, come from the first large nationwide study of stroke hospitalizations by age. Government researchers compared hospitalizations in 1994 and 1995 with ones in 2006 and 2007.
The sharpest increase — 51 percent — was among men 15 through 34. Strokes rose among women in this age group, too, but not as fast — 17 percent.
"It's definitely alarming," said Dr. Ralph Sacco, American Heart Association president and a neurologist at the University of Miami. "We have worried for a while that the increased prevalence of obesity in children and young adults may take its toll in cardiovascular disease and stroke," and that appears to be happening, he said.
Stroke still takes its highest toll on older people. For those over 65, there were nearly 300 stroke cases among 10,000 hospitalizations in the more recent period studied. For males 15 to 34, there were about 15 stroke cases per 10,000, and for girls and women in that age group there were about 4 per 10,000.
Several small studies had recently suggested an ominous rise among the young and among middle-aged women.
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(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
This regime is enough to give 5 yr olds a stroke.
My hubby told me this morning, a news item about school kids getting hit when they ran in front of vehicles.
Why?
Mo0bama telling kiddies in her school appearances to ‘get out there and run’.
Unbelievable!
Xer Ping
Ping list for the discussion of the politics and social (and sometimes nostalgic) aspects that directly effects Generation Reagan / Generation-X (Those born from 1965-1981) including all the spending previous generations are doing that Gen-X and Y will end up paying for.
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Lifestyle and the administration.
yes that's right... only NINE months!!!
I am guessing most people will spend more than 9 months of their life in the gym trying to not become obese so they can live longer..
lol
Oh and AID’s reduces your lifespan by 30+ YEARS, but you will never hear a peep about that.
It’s all that tofu and low fat milk that’s causing the upswing in strokes among the young... Gotta get a sin tax on that stuff...
By this article, they ASSUME “obesity” is causing an increase, yet there is not 1 statement in there correlating FAT young people to young people having strokes.
How many of these girls/women are on the pill? Seriously, it was tested in third world countries just because stroke and blood clots are among the side effects and a lot of women died.
Although abdominal obesity is one of the leading risk factors, women do not typically get abdominal obesity. They typically put on fat in the gluteofemoral region, upper arms, mid-back, and breasts. From a CV health standpoint, this pattern of fat deposition is much safer than the visceral (abdominal) fat that is more common in men. Visceral fat mobilizes into the blood when someone is under stress, or even when exercising. But the subcutaneous fat that women typically have is more metabolically inert.
Anyway, the metric they used in the study was weird. It was the proportion of total hospitalizations due to an ischemic stroke:
More accurate report on this study
What if the incidence of other hospitalization reasons declined (for example, violent crime has been in a secular decline for the past 20 years)? This would cause the proportion of hospitalizations due to stroke to increase, all else being equal.
Assuming that the vast majority of people would go to a hospital if they experience stroke symptoms, why not simply use the population at large as a denominator?
Whoops, I forgot all about our hard-working neighbors "living in the shadows". At least in the past, the census data didn't really count them. Money quote from a relevant study:
"After multivariable adjustment, hypertension prevalence was 2 to 3x higher among black and Hispanic women but similar among Chinese and Japanese women compared with white women."
Ethnic Variations in hypertension in women
Well, that's an interesting set of facts. Hispanic women, whose numbers have increased dramatically in recent years due to illegal immigration, are 2-3x more likely to have hypertension, which is the leading risk factor for stroke. I don't have time to do the math, but it seems that this could explain a big chunk of the increase.
And it seems that the so-called journalist who reported on this study is either willfully ignorant, or has a political agenda to promote.
How about cell phone use, constantly microwaving your head can’t be good, also that would fit the demographic.
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