Deans' stroke musings: Statin Use and Microbleeds in Patients With Spontaneous Intracerebral Hemorrhage

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Statin Use and Microbleeds in Patients With Spontaneous Intracerebral Hemorrhage

Make sure your doctor reads you your rights on statins. Only 3 months old so your doctor better know about this.
http://stroke.ahajournals.org/content/43/10/2677.abstract

Abstract

Background and Purpose—Statins have been associated with increased risk of intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), particularly in elderly patients with previous ICH. Recurrent ICH in the elderly is often related to cerebral amyloid angiopathy. Therefore, we investigated whether statin use is associated with increased prevalence and severity of microbleeds (MB), particularly cortico-subcortical microbleeds (csMB), which are frequently observed in cerebral amyloid angiopathy.

Methods—We studied 163 consecutive patients with spontaneous ICH who underwent magnetic resonance imaging within 30 days of presentation. We retrieved clinical information and analyzed magnetic resonance imaging for the presence, location, and number of MB, which were divided into csMB or other (other MB). We performed group comparisons stratified by statin use and by the presence vs absence of any MB (csMB and/or other MB) or csMB alone.

Results—Sixty-four percent had lobar ICH. Overall, 53% had microbleeds and 39% had csMB. Statin users were older, had significantly lower cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein levels, and higher prevalence of hypertension, diabetes, dyslipidemia, and antiplatelet use. The prevalence and number of other MB were similar in statin-treated and statin-untreated individuals. However, more statin-treated patients had csMB (57% vs 33%; P=0.007), with almost twice as many lesions (4.6±11.3 vs 2.4±8.0; P=0.007) compared with untreated patients. Age and statin use were independently associated with both the presence and increased number of MB (odds ratio [OR], 1.03; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.00–1.05; P=0.01 and OR, 2.72; 95% CI. 1.02–7.22; P=0.04, respectively) and csMB (OR, 1.03; 95% CI, 1.00–1.06; P=0.01 and OR, 4.15; 95% CI, 1.54–11.20; P&lt0.01) in multivariate analyses.

Conclusions—Statin use in patients with ICH is independently associated with MB, especially csMB. Future studies are needed to confirm our findings and to investigate whether csMB can serve as a surrogate marker for ICH risk in statin-treated patients.