http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/12/03/131778963/stay-fit-to-reduce-risk
-of-stroke

Stay Fit To Reduce Risk Of Stroke
Categories: Disabilities, Heart Disease & Stroke, Your Health, Aging

10:04 am

December 3, 2010

  
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  by Scott Hensley

 
Willie B. Thomas/iStockphoto.com 
Eat well and stay fit to keep a stroke at bay.

If you want to avoid a stroke, you can start by living a healthier life.

Shed those extra pounds if you're overweight, exercise regularly, eat more
fruits and vegetables and less salt, say guidelines just released by the
American Heart Association and American Stroke Association. Oh, and don't
smoke, please. Although drinking a little wouldn't hurt and might help.

There's a lot of advice for preventing a first stroke, most of it for
doctors. There are specific recommendations for blood pressure targets,
diabetic patients (who are at higher stroke risk) and when to recommend
aspirin (only for people at especially high risk.

  
The guidelines, which were last revised in 2006, run nearly 70 pages. The
executive summary is six-pages long!

But the most important advice is pretty simple. Living better can cut the
risk of a first stroke by 80 percent, Duke's Dr. Larry B. Goldstein tells
Medscape. "There's virtually nothing that we can do with medicine or
interventions of any kind that's going to have that kind of impact, so that
I think is of paramount importance," says Goldstein, a stroke specialist who
chaired the guideline group.

Prevention is key because more than three-quarters of the nearly 800,000
people who have strokes in this country each year are having first strokes.

"Between 1999 and 2006, there's been over a 30 percent reduction in stroke
death rates in the United States and we think the majority of the reduction
is coming from better prevention," Goldstein says in a statement.

If you or someone close to you has a stroke, it's important to get to the
hospital as quickly as possible. Most strokes are caused by blood clots. A
drug that dissolves clots can go a long way toward saving lives and reducing
disability if it's given in time, as NPR's Richard Knox reported last year.

Finally, some hospitals in the country are certified as stroke centers,
meaning they provide state-of-the-art care. If you'd like to find one
nearby, check out this database.

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