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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next >> Until recently, little was known about the health of people who experienced subtle symptoms but were never diagnosed as having a stroke.
Using data from a large national study of black and white individuals over age 45, Howard found that people who had stroke symptoms, but no stroke diagnosis, scored lower on tests of mental and physical function. Their scores were 5.5 points lower for physical functioning and 2.7 points lower for mental functioning than those people who'd had no symptoms.
What does that level of decline mean, exactly?
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The survey questions used to assess mental and physical function are very general. For example, a person might be asked whether he or she had troubling climbing stairs in the past month.
"We can't know from this set of questions exactly what the symptoms are that are causing trouble climbing stairs, such as loss of balance, for example," said Howard's colleague Dr. Monika Safford, assistant professor of preventive medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The questions are designed to compare deficits across populations and disease states, she explained.
To put the results into perspective, Safford cited an English study in which older people living in a community experienced a 10-point decline on a similar question set if they developed knee pain over three years. "Therefore, suffering a 'whispering stroke' may give you about half the general physical impairment of knee arthritis," she reasoned.
Howard and his team reported their findings in the journal Stroke. Since then, his team has done follow-up work, suggesting that "these silent strokes are associated with very negative outcomes."
Indeed, in a separate study involving brain MRIs, a U.S. research team reported that one in 10 healthy, middle-aged adults had suffered a silent stroke. For purposes of the study, whispering strokes were considered silent strokes.
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