Birmingham Alabama is right in the center of the "stroke belt". The probability of stroke is increased by the high rate of obesity (30 plus percent) in Birmingham but new research reported at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2012 on February 1, 2012, links sleep apnea to stoke.
A study of patients with an average age of 67 who underwent magnetic resonance imaging and computerized tomography to determine the presence of silent strokes and white matter lesions in their brains produced the following results:
Ninety-one percent of people that had a stork and had sleep apnea were more likely to have silent strokes and white matter lesions,
Having more than five severe sleep apnea episodes per night indicated silent stokes had occurred,
Over 50 percent of the patients who had sleep apnea had suffered an unknown silent stroke,
High blood pressure (a complication of obesity) was found to be a major contributing factor to silent strokes.
Jessica Kepplinger, M.D., stroke fellow in the Dresden University Stroke Center's Department of Neurology at the University of Technology in Dresden, Germany, led the research. Co-authors are: Kristian Barlinn, M.D.; Amelia Boehme, M.S.C.; Lars-Peder Pallesen, M.D.; Wiebke Schrempf, M.D.; Johannes Gerber, M.D.; Karen Albright, D.O., Ph.D.; Andrei Alexandrov, M.D.; and Ulf Bodechtel, M.D
The research was reviewed at the Eureka Alert web site on Feruary 1, 2012.
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