Strokes Don't Just Happen To The Elderly

Strokes are not a good thing to have. It’s the third leading cause of death in North America. It’s the number one cause of long-term, serious disability. Three quarters of a million people will have a stroke this year and a third of those are going to die from that stroke. These are really big numbers.  

It’s not an old person’s disease necessarily either. A third of all the people that get a stroke will be under age 65. Those are numbers we best perk our eyebrows up and pay attention. The other thing that’s important to know is that if you’re African American those numbers go up even more dramatically. There is a three-fold increase if you have those genetics. Those are numbers that should get our attention.

What is a stroke? A stroke is when blood flow to a part of the brain stops. Within minutes brain cells begin to die. There are two kinds of stroke. You can have a blood loss in the brain where an artery starts bleeding from an aneurism or something like that. That produces a stroke. Then there is a clot-type stroke where you get a plugging. One way or the other a stroke is essentially loss of blood flow to an area of the brain. That’s why strokes can look so different. It’s whatever part of the brain that the blood is going to that gets stopped up or starts bleeding, that’s the area that is affected. That’s why some people can get numbness on a leg or arm or part of the face, or even have speech loss or vision or balance loss. 

Now if you’re having a heart attack, you can cognitively with your brain think about that.  “Okay, my chest feels tight. I’m sweating. I’m feeling anxious. I’ve got pain in my left arm.” You’ve read these symptoms and you can think about them and say, “I may be having a heart attack. Dial 911.” The problem with stroke is your thinking organ is being affected. You may not be able to reason about it. It is important for all of us to know the signs of stroke so that we can recognize it if it’s happening to someone else.  

If we do see it happening it’s really important that we do something about it. There’s a time for energy medicine and there’s a time for waiting on things. There’s a time for doing herbals and homeopathics and nutritionals, but this is the time to head for the hospital or dial 911 because of the long-term implications of letting this slide for just minutes.  

Remember I mentioned that there were two different kinds of stroke? There is the bleeding and then there’s the stoppage, the clot-type events. One of the problems from the medical side that doctors face with a stroke is after you get to the hospital they’ve still got to figure out which that is because you treat these two kinds of strokes two completely different ways.  

With the clot they are going to give you some medicine to help dissolve the clot. But if you’re bleeding, that would be the absolute worst thing you could do. You’re probably going to have to get an MRI or CT. They’ve got to wait for one of those to get empty and then do the scan, then get the results. That’s why it’s important not to let any time at all get by before you go to the hospital. If you get to the hospital and the symptoms resolve, hey, you can always go home! Regardless, this is a very time-critical issue.  

What does a stroke look like?  Sudden weakness or numbness any place in the body, face, arm, leg, the abdomen and chest. Dimness or loss of vision usually in one eye. It’s usually one-sided unless there’s a huge aneurism with a lot of blood loss or something. Then it can be both sides. Usually strokes are one sided. Loss of speech or trouble talking, articulating, getting your words out. That is a one-sided event but it takes both sides of the tongue working and the cheeks to get words out. Sudden or severe headache, dizziness or instability walking, falling. These are acute. These are things that happen quickly. I’m not talking about having a little trouble with your balance for the last few weeks and it may be a little worse this week. No, I’m talking about a sudden inability or sudden event.

Why do you get strokes? What are the risk factors? High blood pressure is way up top there. High cholesterol combined with high blood pressure leads to hardening of the arteries. Diabetes is a risk factor. Smoking is a risk factor. Heart disease is a risk factor.  You could throw a clot up to the brain if you have fibrillation or something like that. Arteriosclerosis can occur in the carotid artery and a piece of plaque could brat off there and go up to the brain. It’s all pretty much vascular related except for the smoking. Of course that causes arteriosclerosis so we’re back to the same idea of one cause with a lot of things that feed into that.  

What can you do to prevent strokes from happening? If you’re smoking that can be helped. You can stop that. Keep your blood pressure down. Eat healthy. Eat reasonable portions of meat. I only eat one portion of meat a day and I’ve tried to trim that down to about half the size I used to eat. I take fish oil every day. I take olive oil every day. Probably at least equal to vitamins, maybe even more important, are antioxidants. All of this damage occurs in a general form that we’ll call oxidative. Another way to say that is we’re rusting. Antioxidants help prevent that process. Those are some of the things we can do in a preventative fashion.  

Hypertension and You.

This week we’re going to change the focus from breast health on to other areas that affect your health, specifically hypertension (or high blood pressure). 

Obviously, high blood pressure is not a good thing.

Let me help you understand why.  Think of your blood vessels as a garden hose.  When your heart pumps, there is a bolus (a large ball of fluid) that comes through your arteries every second or so. That whole big volume of blood that’s in the ventricle goes out almost at one time.  It’s kind of like the Tom and Jerry cartoons that you see where the mouse gets caught in the hose and there’s a bulge in the hose where he's hiding from the cat. That happens every time your heart pumps.  That bulge of fluid goes out through the arteries and it stretches them in the process.

It doesn’t take much of a thought process to figure out that as you increase the pressure it increases the stretching of the artery walls.  They are made of little elastic fibers.  As you stretch them too much those elastic fibers begin to break.  Then the body repairs it with a patch that we call cholesterol or plaque.  Cholesterol, calcium and other substances such as fibrin, are part of that patch.  That’s how that whole process of hardening of the arteries occurs.  You get too much stress, you get damage, and then you get the patch.  Now that patch doesn’t flex and the rest of the arterial wall has to flex even more.  It becomes a vicious cycle.  You can see how that creates a perpetual damage problem ongoing. 

So, we can see that keeping your blood pressure under control is important in order not to damage the arteries so that the arteries can function with their natural stretch properties every time that bolus of blood comes out of the ventricle.  It’s also important in order to not damage organs like your kidneys, your brain, etc. 

There are some natural things you can do to keep blood pressure under control.  The simplest one is stay out of stress.  I’ve already mentioned briefly that stress causes disease, and in fact chronic stress is a major cause of hypertension.  If you’re interested in supplements, magnesium has been shown to reduce blood pressure significantly.  There are a number of other natural things that have benefit.  Garlic is another supplement that can help prevent or treat hypertension. Even though garlic will make you smell, it could save your life.

The bottom line: keeping our blood pressure low is very important, especially for the cardiovascular system. I’ll be talking more about cardiovascular health in the coming weeks on this blog and on my podcasts, so stay tuned!