By Sola Ogundipe

AS the world marked this year’s World Stroke Day, October 29, a new study revealed that  younger women that are pregnant are at greater risk of developing stroke than their older counterparts.

While it is true that older women  usually have more pregnancy complications, the study suggests that younger women are more than twice as likely to experience stroke during or just after pregnancy than their non-pregnant counterparts.

WALK AGAINST STROKE: Participants at the Walk & Run Against Strokes organized by Stroke Action Nigeria in commemoration of the World Stroke Day activity held in Abuja weekend.

Researchers also found that pregnant older women had a similar stroke risk as their non-pregnant counterparts, while younger pregnant women were found to be at more than double the risk of stroke than non-pregnant women of same age.

Findings of the study by Dr. Eliza C. Miller, of the Department of Neurology at Columbia University Medical Center  in New York, published in JAMA Neurology, document evidence that pregnancy can raise stroke risk.

For their study, Miller and team set out to determine the risk of stroke during pregnancy by age.

Using data from the New York State Department of Health Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS) inpatient database, the researchers were able to pinpoint 19,146 women  aged 12-55 years who had been hospitalized for stroke.

Of these women, 797 (4.2 percent) were pregnant or had given birth in the last 6 weeks.

They looked at the incidence of stroke for both pregnant and non-pregnant women across four age groups: 12-24 years, 25-34 years, 35-44 years, and 45-55 years.

Overall, the team found that stroke incidence increased with age; there were 14 stroke events per 100,000 pregnant or postpartum women aged 12-24, while the stroke events for pregnant or postpartum women aged 45-55 were 46.9 per 100,000.

However, when it came to assessing stroke risk relative to non-pregnant women, the team found younger women fared worse.

Based on their findings, Miller and team say it is perhaps time to increase focus on identifying and reducing stroke risk among younger pregnant women.

“We have been warning older women that pregnancy may increase their risk of stroke, but this study shows that their stroke risk appears similar to women of the same age who are not pregnant.

But in women under 35, pregnancy significantly increased the risk of stroke – 1 in 5 strokes in women from that age group were related to pregnancy.

More research is needed to better understand the causes of pregnancy-associated stroke to identify young women at the highest risk and prevent the devastating events.