Stroke

Pagina: Anti-Aging For Men

Stroke

When a vessel in the brain hemorrhages and blood goes smashing about where it doesn’t belong, the result can be irreparable damage to brain tissue. Increased pressure on the brain can have profound effects on the health of the entire nervous system, the brain itself, or, more significantly, actual deadly pressure on the brain stem.

When it comes to the broad and important category of cerebrovascular diseases, the U.S. government’s Framingham study, which has tracked more than 5,000 adult residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, since the late 1940s, found hypertension, either systolic or diastolic, to be the most important risk factor producing strokes. Because African-American males demonstrate the highest incidence of essential hypertension (of unknown cause, yet treatable), it should come as no surprise that this same group has the highest incidence of strokes.

Other risk factors that the aging male can eliminate by an occasional visit to the doctor include diabetes, a high cholesterol and triglyceride, or cigarette smoking. The incidence of strokes has declined largely owing to the more vigorous preventive approaches being taken. This may well represent one of the areas where epidemiology and hands-on medicine have worked successfully together to treat disease.

The initial approach to anyone unfortunate enough to have developed a stroke is supportive care. This is because at first there is a great deal of swelling or edema, which can accentuate the severity of the usual findings from a stroke. At its worst, the edema can affect the respiratory center and compromise usually automatic or involuntary breathing.

During this time, steroids and mannitol, a large-molecule sugar, can be given to shrink swelling. During the acute phase of the stroke, there should be careful attention to the breakdown of skin (decubiti), which can develop over mere hours; the prevention of urinary retention; and the psychological needs of the impaired patient. If the stroke involves Broca’s speech area on the left side of the brain, the stroke victim usually has an expressive aphasia (unable to express oneself verbally) in addition to a possibly complete flaccid paralysis of the opposite side of the body.

There are the plenty who will have a stroke and return to very near their earlier level. The changes may be very subtle: a dragging foot or an arm and hand pulled up and barely functional from contractures. They may have a persistent facial droop, not altogether unlike what one sees in someone with a Bell’s (a peripheral seventh cranial nerve) palsy. Classically, someone with a typical central stroke will deflect the movement of their tongue to the side of the stroke. anti aging formula