Welcome to InCirculation.net
InCirculation.net is a professional cardiovascular resource intended for a global audience of specialists, generalists, researchers, and other healthcare professionals
Cardiovascular news provides daily news updates to help you stay informed.
Stroke etiology differs between men and women
3 July 2009
MedWire News: Researchers have observed significant differences in the causes of stroke among men and women, with women more likely to suffer cardioembolic stroke and men more likely to suffer lacunar stroke.
In contrast, baseline characteristics, rates of thrombolysis related complications, clinical outcome measures and 3-month mortality rates show no gender-specific variations, Alex Förster and colleagues from the University of Heidelberg in Mannheim, Germany, report in the journal Stroke.
Since differences between women and men in relation to stroke are increasingly being recognized, Förster and team carried out a study to compare probable stroke etiology and stroke imaging patterns among 237 male and female patients with acute ischemic stroke.
Of the 237 patients (mean age 70.7 years), 111 (46.8%) were women and 126 (53.2%) were men. All were treated with recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rtPA) within 3 hours after onset of symptoms.
The researchers report that the women were significantly older than men, but were less likely to have a history of hyperlipidemia, smoking, and coronary heart disease than men.
Internal carotid artery (ICA) disease was more than twice as common in men than in women at 19.0% versus 8.1%. In contrast, women were more than 1.6 times as likely to have cardioembolism or atrial fibrillation than men at 44.1% versus 27.8% and 41.4% versus 23.8%, respectively. Förster et al speculate that this finding may explain the trend for a higher percentage of large territorial strokes (72.8% vs 60.3%) observed in women than in men.
In men, borderzone or small embolic and lacunar stroke was found more frequently, at 39.7% compared with 27.2% in women, and could be due to the higher rates of asymptomatic or symptomatic high grade or subtotal ICA stenosis or occlusion that were observed in men compared with women (24.6% vs 8.6%), suggest the researchers.
Of note, the frequency of persistent vessel occlusion was significantly higher in men than women (34.0% vs 20.7%), which supports previous findings that suggest thrombolysis is more efficient in women. The reason why women may respond better to thrombolysis is unknown and requires further investigation say Förster and co-authors.
