Many patients urgently admitted to hospital with cerebral infarction state that they were under great stress over a prolonged period prior to suffering their stroke, is shown in a unique patient study conducted in cooperation between the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg and Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Sweden.
The study is published in the scientific journal BMC Medicine.
"There appears to be a correlation between stress and stroke, but this needs to be interpreted with great caution. We asked about self-perceived stress among the stroke patients, and there is, of course, a risk of patients who have just had a cerebral infarction remembering incorrectly or over-interpreting with regard to their level of stress, says Katarina Jood, who is a researcher at the Sahlgrenska Academy and a neurologist at Sahlgrenska University Hospital.
Nearly 600 patients were asked to complete a questionnaire in this study, no later than ten days after being admitted to Sahlgrenska University Hospital with acute cerebral infarction. In the questionnaire, the patients were asked to choose between six different alternatives to indicate how stressed they had felt before their stroke, from "never been stressed" to "constantly stressed over the past five years". The patients' responses were compared with a healthy control group who were asked the same question.
"We found an independent link between self-perceived psychological stress and stroke. A new finding was that the link between stress and stroke varies between different types of cerebral infarction," says Jood.