Every year, more than 500,000 U.S. citizens are diagnosed by their doctors as having had a stroke. This makes strokes one of the leading health problems in the country. But even though many major strokes are diagnosed, there are a huge number of silent strokes that are occurring completely below the radar.
A lot of of these mini-strokes remain undiagnosed because people are unaware that it’s happened. We often think of strokes as a dramatic event that immediately causes signs such as paralysis, being unable to talk, etc. Most so called silent strokes, however, do not trigger such symptoms.
Much of the time the discovery that they may have had a mini-stroke happens when they are having medical tests performed for some seemingly unrelated symptoms. A recent study revealed that up to as many as 10% of people with an average age of 62 had evidence of a min-stroke according to their MRI brain scan.
A disturbing trend for the past 10 years or so, is that the number of incidences of these silent strokes seem to be happing at younger ages. It’s probably to be expected as certain other diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure are occurring in adults at earlier ages as well. The extremely disconcerting thing about the rising number of silent strokes is that many have them and don’t even realize it because they have no symptoms.
In fact, in most cases the only evidence that a silent stroke has occurred may be the printout on an MRI brain scan, which many people don’t have as a regular part of the annual checkup.
The sad part is that many strokes are preventable simply by following sensible health guidelines on how to safely lower high blood pressure.
Melissa Chow is a freelance writer who writes articles relating to easy to find herbs that lower blood pressure, and how to control high blood pressure. Please visit her site for more info.
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