If perfectly healthy people get strokes frequently, why isn’t that anti-stroke medication more common than Narcan?
I didn’t say it happens frequently, just that it can happen to anybody.
I am also not suggesting that everybody take antistroke medications as precautions, because I don’t work for Big Pharma.
“Because about 80% of all strokes are preventable, we really focus on prevention,” says Dr. Stephen English, a Mayo Clinic neurologist.
Preventing stroke risks
Tips for lowering stroke risk include maintaining blood pressure under 130/80 and keeping cholesterol and blood glucose at appropriate levels.
“(Other modifiable risks include) things like smoking cessation, treatment of sleep apnea with a CPAP device, and some other potential treatments,” he says. “We want to make sure that the risk factors are mitigated to help reduce the long-term risk of stroke.”
There are risk factors for stroke that cannot be changed. These include age, sex, race and family history. “There are four nonmodifiable risk factors we typically think about. The first is age, so age greater than 55; males; people that have a family history of prior stroke; and then people that are of African American descent,” says Dr. English