The main risk factors for stroke are fairly general in nature although they are quite complex from a scientific standpoint. It’s important to understand these risks as they relate to your life because they are similar but different from other cardiovascular diseases. Although many of these risks are the same for stroke, heart attack, and other cardiovascular diseases not all cover each condition.
For instance one of the main risks for having a stroke is high blood pressure. High blood pressure increases your risk for having a stroke many times over because the strain places on some of the small blood vessels in the brain can become to great. When this happens and the blood vessels burst then a stoke ensues.
In contrast to heart disease blood pressure is rarely high enough to cause blood vessels to burst in the heart and thus this risk is different for this condition. For heart disease high blood pressure places a strain on cholesterol which has built up along the walls of your arteries. As the blood pressure increases the cholesterol has the potential of breaking off in small chunks due to the blood flow and traveling into the heart clogging it and stopping blood flow causing a heart attack.
This risk however is the same with heart disease and stroke because the floating piece of cholesterol or floating blood clot can just as easily travel to the brain and block blood flow causing a stroke. Often this happens due to clots that form in the limbs due to poor circulation which is also a risk indicator for both heart disease and stroke.
Above all, atherosclerosis, or the hardening of the arteries due to cholesterol build up, is often significantly responsible for hypertension and hypertension is often the main cause of strokes. If you want to lower your risks for all forms of cardiovascular conditions or simply improve heart attack recovery or prevention, then you will have to address both issues but if you want to narrowly focus on lowering your risks of having a stroke then make sure to lower your blood pressure and relieve stress from your life. You’ll be glad you did.
