Why more young people are having strokes

More young people are experiencing strokes and researchers at Cleveland Clinic have published new findings exploring the reasons why.
“When that 30-year-old is disabled with a big blockage stroke for the rest of their life, that makes not just a patient, but families suffer,” said Staff Neurologist and Assistant Professor at Cleveland Clinic Learner College of Medicine Dr. Abbas Khral. “My special interest in this young adult population was to better understand why are younger adults having large vessel or big blockage stokes.”
Researchers reviewed the records of 1,200 patients between the ages of 18-49 who presented at Cleveland Clinic from 2017-2021. Khral said this Midwestern population is very different from those on the East or West coasts.
“Here, I feel that lifestyles are a lot more sedentary, overall, in general is life just busier than it used to be, do people have less time for exercise, are our diets more synthetic than we used to be?”
Khral said the incidence of big blockage stroke in the study was about 20 % of all patients, which is very similar to the rates in older adults.
“We are seeing a rise in diabetes and high blood pressure and high cholesterol in younger adults,” he said. “The biggest thing that it says loud and clear is that no age group is immune to stroke, any age group, particularly even young adults.”
The study also reviewed whether treatment affects young people differently.
“Overall, our study found that young adults do exceedingly well if they present on time enough to get the best available treatments that we have,” he said. “Fifty percent of patients received no treatment and a quarter of that was because of a delay in presenting to the hospital.”
Khral said it’s important that people don’t brush off symptoms. He’s seen those situations in clinical practice.
“They had symptoms the night before but you know the patient or their significant other thought, they’re just stressed or they had an argument earlier, or they’re just tired and that’s why they have a face droop, or that’s why their speech is a little funny and they just slept over their symptoms and when they presented the next morning, when they woke up and saw that things are much worse, now they can’t move an arm or leg.”
Identifying barriers to treatment is key, and so is raising awareness about the symptoms of a strike and the importance of timely treatment.