Cirrhosis , a chronic disease in which atrophy of cells in an organ occurs, not only constitutes a risk in itself, but also due to other associated pathologies. A team of researchers from the Weill Cornell Medicine center in New York has established a relationship between cirrhosis and stroke , finding that people over 66 years of age with cirrhosis are more frequently hospitalized for this pathology , especially of a hemorrhagic type.
Alcohol abuse , hepatitis C infection and metabolic disease are the processes that trigger cirrhosis, which causes the fibrous tissue of an organ to proliferate and cause it to malfunction. But they would also be the triggers, therefore, of a second associated damage: stroke . During the study, more than 15,000 patients were analyzed over 4 years, and of them half were hospitalized for a cerebrovascular accident , with an incidence of 2.17 percent per year in patients with cirrhosis and 1.11 percent in patients without cirrhosis, which is almost double . Furthermore, the majority of patients admitted with stroke were hemorrhagic.
On the other hand, men are hospitalized with this double pathology more frequently than women . As detailed in the study, “patients with cirrhosis were more often men and had higher rates of risk factors for stroke, particularly hemorrhagic stroke .”
Stroke-type stroke or hemorrhagic stroke is caused by the rupture of a blood vessel in the brain. The study could lead to “deepening the epidemiology and pathophysiology of this relationship between cirrhosis and hemorrhagic stroke, to find a way to reduce the risk of stroke and prevention “, concludes the article, which has been published in the journal Jama Neurology.
References:
Neal S. Parikh, Babak B. Navi, Yecheskel Schneider. (2017). Association Between Cirrhosis and Stroke in a Nationally Representative Cohort. Jama Neurology. doi: 10.1001 / jamaneurol.2017.0923.
