Mexican-Americans with heart rhythm disorder have increased risk for second stroke
American Heart Association rapid access journal report
2010-09-10
(Press-News.org) Mexican-American stroke survivors with a heart rhythm disorder have more than twice the risk for another stroke compared to non-Hispanic whites, according to a study published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.
Mexican-Americans' recurrent strokes are also more likely to be severe, though they don't have a greater risk of death after stroke, researchers said.
Researchers compared 88 Mexican-American and 148 non-Hispanic white stroke survivors who had atrial fibrillation, a disorder in which the heart's upper chambers (called the atria) beat irregularly and don't pump blood effectively, possibly causing blood to pool within the atria and blood clot formation in the heart.
They found that the likelihood of suffering another stroke during the study follow-up period was more than double for Mexican-Americans than for non-Hispanic whites. Although stroke recurrence was higher and strokes were more severe among Mexican-Americans, death rates didn't differ between the two groups.
"Based on some of our prior research, we were not necessarily surprised by the higher recurrence risk in Mexican-Americans with atrial fibrillation, but the greater severity of recurrent strokes in Mexican-Americans was surprising," said Darin B. Zahuranec, M.D., study co-author and an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Michigan Cardiovascular Center in Ann Arbor.
Results are based on cases of ischemic stroke and transient ischemic attack from the Brain Attack Surveillance in Corpus Christi Project, a population-based stroke surveillance study. The data were collected between January 2000 and June 2008. Corpus Christi has a large Mexican-American population and is located along the Gulf coast of Texas.
The study also showed that Mexican-American patients were younger, less likely to have completed 12 years of education, more likely to have diabetes, and less likely to have a primary care physician. Researchers found no ethnic differences between the two groups in the severity of the first stroke.
Nineteen Mexican-Americans and 14 non-Hispanic whites had at least one recurrent stroke over a median follow-up of 427.5 days; all but one event was an ischemic stroke (one Mexican-American patient experienced intracerebral hemorrhage).
One reason for the difference could be that the management of warfarin — a blood thinning drug — among Mexican-Americans may not be optimal, Zahuranec said. However, the study found no ethnic difference in the proportion of patients who were prescribed warfarin at hospital discharge. They did not evaluate data looking at outpatient use of warfarin after hospital discharge which might have contributed to the increased risk of stroke in Mexican-Americans.
Atrial fibrillation affects approximately 2.2 million Americans; about 15 percent of strokes occur among individuals with atrial fibrillation.
INFORMATION:
Co-authors are J.R. Simpson, M.D.; L.D Lisabeth, Ph.D.; B.N. Sánchez, Ph.D.; L.E. Skolarus M.D.; J.E. Mendizabal, M.D.; M.A. Smith, DrPH; N.M. Garcia, B.S.; and L.B. Morgenstern, M.D. Author disclosures are on the manuscript.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Statements and conclusions of study authors published in American Heart Association scientific journals are solely those of the study authors and do not necessarily reflect the association's policy or position. The association makes no representation or guarantee as to their accuracy or reliability. The association receives funding primarily from individuals; foundations and corporations (including pharmaceutical, device manufacturers and other companies) also make donations and fund specific association programs and events. The association has strict policies to prevent these relationships from influencing the science content. Revenues from pharmaceutical and device corporations are available at www.americanheart.org/corporatefunding.
NR10 – 1117 (Stroke/Zahuranec)
Editor's note: The American Heart Association has an online Spanish-language tool that identifies if a person is in poor, intermediate or ideal health, called Marcando Los 7 Pasos Para Mi Salud. For a simple step-by-step approach and action plan that may help individuals achieve healthier lives, visit heart.org/marcando7pasos.
Additional public resources:
www.americanstroke.org
Atrial fibrillation - http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/Conditions/Arrhythmia/TypesofArrhythmias/Fibrillation_UCM_302027_Article.jsp
Additional media resources
Downloadable stock footage and animation are available at www.heart.newsroom.com, click on "Multimedia Resources".
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2010-09-10
Tuberculosis, or TB, is a dreaded contagious disease of the lungs and other organs. The causative agent, Mycobacterium tuberculosis (or M. tuberculosis), infects roughly a third of the world's population and one-in-ten to one-in-twenty of the infected population becomes sick or infectious at some point during their lifetime.
The mycobacteria survive, and even thrive, inside host macrophages – cells that are part of the human immune system and that usually engulf and destroy bacteria in structures called phagosomes. M. tuberculosis is taken into phagosomes but it somehow ...
2010-09-10
An analysis of wind farm applications in England shows that rejection of wind energy projects is connected to areas with high political engagement and high life expectancy. The current trend shows that many technically suitable locations may remain unused because of the threat of effective local resistance by people who are relatively privileged.
Planning delays and rejections encourage commercial developers to instead focus on remote or deprived communities as sites for new power plants. In areas of economic fragility, commercial plants are more easily established without ...
2010-09-10
DURHAM, N.C. – Drug companies may be more willing to develop treatments for neglected diseases including malaria, tuberculosis and leishmanaiasis if the European Union would adopt a "priority review voucher" reward system.
The vouchers would give a company accelerated regulatory review of one of its other drugs as a reward for developing a treatment for a neglected disease.
Although these diseases affect more than 1 billion people, they occur most frequently in developing nations, providing little financial incentive for pharmaceutical companies to create and test new ...
2010-09-10
People who are better at simple physical acts such as gripping, walking, rising from a chair and balancing on one leg are more likely to live longer, according to a new study published on bmj.com today.
Measures of physical capability, such as grip strength, walking speed, chair rising time and standing balance ability, can predict mortality in older people living in the community, UK researchers found.
These measures are related to a person's ability to perform everyday tasks. There is growing interest in using such measures as simple screening tools to identify ...
2010-09-10
Diagnostic errors are the most important causes of avoidable harm to patients in hospitals, warns a senior doctor on bmj.com today.
Dr Gordon Caldwell, a consultant physician at Worthing Hospital in Western Sussex argues that doctors need better facilities and sufficient time to make a correct diagnosis.
When a patient is admitted to hospital, the team of doctors formulate a "working diagnosis," he explains. At this point, the diagnosis is uncertain but the patient is treated as if the working diagnosis is correct.
"If over the next few days the patient gets better, ...
2010-09-10
Imagine a war in which you are vastly outnumbered by an enemy that is utterly relentless – attacking you is all it does. The intro to another Terminator movie? No, just another day for microbes such as bacteria and archaea, which face a never-ending onslaught from viruses and invading strands of nucleic acid known as plasmids. To survive this onslaught, microbes deploy a variety of defense mechanisms, including an adaptive-type nucleic acid-based immune system that revolves around a genetic element known as CRISPR, which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short ...
2010-09-10
Los Angeles, CA (September 7, 2010) – Joseph Stalin once claimed that a single death was a tragedy, but a million deaths was a statistic. New research from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University validates this sentiment, confirming large-scale tragedies don't connect with people emotionally in the same way smaller tragedies do.
The new study, entitled "The Scope-Severity Paradox: Why doing more harm is judged to be less harmful," has been published in the current issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science (published by SAGE) and was conducted ...
2010-09-10
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Vaccine manufacturers and public health decision-makers need to collaborate in a more efficient and effective manner not only to reduce the likelihood of supply shortages for pediatric vaccines but also to maximize community immunity by using vaccine doses to increase coverage, according to research published by a University of Illinois researcher who specializes in statistics and data analysis.
Sheldon H. Jacobson, a professor of computer science and the director of the simulation and optimization laboratory at Illinois, says that the Pediatric Vaccine ...
2010-09-10
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — For the first time, a team of MIT chemical engineers has observed single ions marching through a tiny carbon-nanotube channel. Such channels could be used as extremely sensitive detectors or as part of a new water-desalination system. They could also allow scientists to study chemical reactions at the single-molecule level.
Carbon nanotubes — tiny, hollow cylinders whose walls are lattices of carbon atoms — are about 10,000 times thinner than a human hair. Since their discovery nearly 20 years ago, researchers have experimented with them as batteries, ...
2010-09-10
MADISON, WI, September 9, 2010 – Cotton growers can produce more cotton if they plant early, but not without irrigation. That's the finding of an article published in the September-October 2010 Agronomy Journal, a publication of the American Society of Agronomy.
Bill Pettigrew, a scientist with the USDA-Agricultural Research Service in Stoneville, Mississippi, tested the performance of cotton under irrigated and non-irrigated plots, with half the plots being planted early (first week of April) and half being planted in the more tradition time period, around the 1st week ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Mexican-Americans with heart rhythm disorder have increased risk for second stroke
American Heart Association rapid access journal report