Healthy diet, lifestyle halves stroke risk in women

A new research has indicated that a healthy diet and lifestyle may help women to avoid stroke by more than half in their life.

The study looked at five factors that make up a healthy lifestyle i.e. healthy diet, moderate alcohol consumption, never smoking; physically active, and healthy body mass index (BMI) and then compared with women with none of the five healthy factors, women with all five factors had a 54-percent lower risk of stroke.

Study author Susanna C. Larsson, PhD, of the Karolinska Instituet in Stockholm, Sweden, said that because the consequences of stroke were usually devastating and irreversible, prevention was of great importance and these results were exciting because they indicated that a healthy diet and lifestyle could substantially reduce the risk of stroke, and these were lifestyle choices that people could make or improve.

Study approached 31,696 Swedish women with an average age of about 60 completed a 350-item questionnaire about their diet and lifestyle and they were then followed for an average of 10 years.

The study observed that most of the women had two or three of the healthy factors and only 589 women had all five healthy factors, and 1,535 had none and there were 1,554 strokes among study participants.

Women with healthier diets had a rate of 28 strokes per 10,000 women per year compared to 43 strokes per 10,000 women per year among those with a less healthy diet.

There was no relationship between the healthy factors and the risk of hemorrhagic stroke. Hemorrhagic stroke, which is caused by bleeding in and around the brain, accounts for about 15 to 20 percent of all strokes.

The study is published online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.