Deans' stroke musings: Vessel Blockage Common in Young Stroke Patients Who Smoke Pot

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.

Monday, October 26, 2015

Vessel Blockage Common in Young Stroke Patients Who Smoke Pot

Can't tell from here whether they even considered that these strokes may be caused by smoking or whether they wanted to find a connection with marijuana. Less aphasia would be a good reason to smoke pot then.
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Cardiology/Strokes/54312?xid=nl_mpt_cardiodaily_2015-10-26&
Regular cannabis users who suffer ischemic strokes before the age of 50 tend to be significantly younger and more likely to have strokes caused by intracranial arterial stenosis compared to patients who do not smoke pot, researchers reported.
In the first study to compare stroke characteristics and prognosis in younger patients who do and do not smoke marijuana, researchers recorded consecutive hospital admissions for ischemic stroke among patients under the age of 45 over a 9-year period at a single teaching hospital in Strasbourg, France.
Among the 334 hospital patients in this age group admitted to the hospital during the study period, 58 (17.4%) reported that they were regular cannabis users.
"Cannabis users were significantly younger, more frequently men, and consumed tobacco and alcohol more frequently than non-cannabis users," researcher Valerie Wolff, MD, PhD, of the University Hospital Strasbourg, and colleagues wrote in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, published online Oct. 26.
The study did not address the controversial question of whether regular marijuana use is causally linked to higher stroke risk in younger adults. But the finding that cannabis users had more strokes caused by intracranial arterial stenosis is consistent with theories of a possible mechanism for this association, Wolff told MedPage Today in an email exchange.
"Cannabis is a known precipitant factor of reversible cerebral vasoconstriction syndrome (RCVS)," Wolff wrote. "We showed in a series of 159 ischemic stroke in the young that the mechanism may be RCVS in 13% of cases. Our results in the new study confirm that intracranial arterial stenosis (one criteria of RCVS) is a frequent cause of stroke."
Oklahoma City internist Mary Ann Bauman, MD, who chairs the American Stroke Association advisory committee, said that while randomized studies are needed to prove a causal link between marijuana use and stroke, the findings by Wolff and colleagues do lend support to the idea that reversible arterial vessel constriction associated with cannabis use may increase stroke risk.
"This study also illustrates how much we really don't know," Bauman told MedPage Today. "We don't know what will happen as marijuana becomes legal in more places and becomes more mainstream. My very great worry is for young people who think there are no health risks to marijuana use at all."
In the newly published study, Wolff and colleagues examined illicit drug use (cannabis, cocaine, and amphetamines) for all ischemic stroke admissions among patients younger than age 45 from 2005 to 2014. Neurological symptoms were recorded at admission and stroke prognosis was evaluated 3 months after the event using the modified Rankin scale.
Intracranial arterial stenosis was found to be the main etiology of stroke in cannabis users, occurring in 45% of these patients compared to just 14.5% of noncannabis users. Among non-users cardioembolism was the most frequent cause of stroke, occurring in 29.3% of patients compared to 14% of cannabis users.
At admission, cannabis users and non-users displayed similar symptoms of 1-sided motor deficit, but cannabis users had more visual disorders and less aphasia compared to non-users.
At 3-month follow-up, functional independence scores were similar for the two groups,with 63.5% of cannabis users and 55.8% of non-users having only mild functional disability and just 1.9% and 2.6%, respectively, having significant disability (Rankin score of 4). Two cannabis users and three non-users died during follow up.
"Our data demonstrate that a favorable functional capacity is common in young patients suffering from stroke independently of cannabis use that is likely due to age-related enhanced brain plasticity," the researchers wrote. "However, in the whole series, 18% of patients retained significant disability, along with 5 deaths."
Limitations of the study included its single-center design and lack of adjustments for alcohol use, cigarette smoking, or other confounders that may also correlate with cannabis use.
Nevertheless, the researchers concluded that it is important for the public to be made aware of the potential impact of marijuana use and related lifestyle factors on stroke risk.