WEDNESDAY, Jan. 7, 2009 (Health.com) — Everyone knows that smoking is bad for your health. But a new study suggests that smoking might be particularly dangerous for people with a family history of stroke.
In fact, smokers with close family members who have had an aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage—a type of bleeding in the brain that accounts for 10% of all strokes—are more than six times as likely to have a stroke themselves.
The combination of smoking and a family history is a more potent risk factor than either alone, says researcher Daniel Woo, MD, who published the results this week in the journal Neurology.
In the study, Dr. Woo and colleagues matched 339 people who had an aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage to more than 1,000 of their healthy peers. Compared to nonsmokers without a close relative with stroke, the risk of a subarachnoid hemorrhage was 2.5 times higher in nonsmokers with a family history, 3.1 times higher in smokers without a family history, and 6.4 times greater in people who were both smokers and had a family history.
“What we found was greater than additive risk,” says Dr. Woo, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Cincinnati. The finding is particularly serious, Dr. Woo says, because subarachnoid hemorrhages tend to strike at younger ages.
Most strokes occur when a clot blocks a blood vessel in the brain, and this type of stroke occurs at an average age of 75. However, people with an aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage, which is caused by a rupture of blood vessel between the surface of the brain and the skull, tend to experience them at younger ages. The average patient is in his 50s,and it’s not unheard of to have such strokes in one’s 30s or 40s, Dr. Woo says.
“People liken it to a hand grenade going off in your brain,” he says. “Your skull is a closed space, and when you now are shooting blood into that closed space, it raises pressure inside the head, so people pass out, they fall unconscious, they have loss of blood flow to the brain; there’s a high mortality rate.”
One-third to 40% of patients die of the hemorrhage and many survivors are left with severe disability.
Comments (1)
-Thank you for bringing up the critical importance of checking family history, more often than not people only look into their history when faced with a serious health problem.