Alcohol increases haemorrhagic stroke risk

By April Clarkson, May 4th, 2013 | Health | 0 Comments

Heavy drinkers run an increased risk of having the kind of stroke caused by bleeding into the brain.
Most strokes are caused by a clot in the blood vessels that serve the brain. But up to 20 per cent of strokes can be attributed to a bleeding from a blood vessel on the surface of the brain or inside it. Researchers at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio have been looking at the risk factors underlying these so-called haemorrhagic - bleeding - strokes.

They looked at a group of people who had had subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH), a stroke where a weak area in a blood vessel at base of the brain bursts, comparing them to a group without SAH. This revealed that heavy alcohol use increases the risk of SAH by ten times; other risk factors include hypertension, smoking and family history of SAH.

Other haemorrhagic strokes include lobar strokes which happen deep in the brain, and nonlobar strokes which affect the thinking areas at the front of the brain. The first type is linked to heavy alcohol use but not to hypertension. For nonlobar stroke, alcohol use is not a factor, but hypertension is. And family history was a factor in both these types of stroke.

Genetics you can’t do anything about - although identifying the genes involved will lead us to a better understanding of haemorrhagic strokes occur. But you can control alcohol consumption and high blood pressure if you want to avoid this kind of stroke.