According to a recent study, overweight people have higher levels of the amino acid homocysteine in their blood than non-obese people, which increases the risk of having a stroke. Strokes of unknown cause, on which the research has focused, occur at very young ages when compared to other types of stroke.
Stroke is a cerebrovascular disease that appears from a sudden disorder of the blood circulation of the brain . The consequence is that a certain region of the brain is altered, leading to paralysis or even death. Cryptogenic strokes , those whose origin is unknown, constitute 30 percent of ischemic strokes, those caused by occlusion of cerebral vessels, generally by the presence of thrombi or an embolism. Ischemic stroke is the third leading cause of death and the leading cause of disability in Western countries.
The research carried out by the Center for Biomedical Research in Network- physiopathology of Obesity and Nutrition (CIBERobn) and led by Dr. Dolores Corella in collaboration with the Hospital La Fe de Valencia, used as a sample two groups of more than one hundred patients one from healthy subjects and the other from cryptogenic stroke patients. The results showed that stroke patients had higher levels of hyperhomocysteinemia than healthy ones, especially in obese patients. It was also found that the body mass index was notably higher in stroke cases than in the group of healthy subjects, which can be considered a risk factor in itself.
As Dr. Corella herself explains, “the importance of hyperhomocysteinemia as a risk factor for cryptogenic stroke is especially relevant in obese people since 38 percent of the obese who suffered cryptogenic stroke presented this amino acid, compared to zero percent of overweight patients who did not suffer from it “.
Hypertension, diabetes, cholesterol or atheroma plaques in the arteries are also known causes of stroke, so the accumulation of fats in the blood appears as an important trigger for this disease. Because of this, the CIBERobn recommends the Mediterranean diet as a preventive method. As Dr. Corella summarizes, “consume a large amount of vegetables and fruits that are rich in folic acid, several servings a day of other protective minerals, vegetables, whole grains, and nuts daily, since they provide vitamin B6, and fish several times per week, reduces the risk of stroke “.
