Women Suffer Worse from Stroke Aftermath

The medical advancement today has empowered doctors to save as more and more heart stroke patients from dying.  But the aftermath of a stroke can prove to be a difficult phase for survivors. A new study has suggested that female survivors of a heart stroke tend to have a poorer quality of life than male stroke survivors do.

"As more people survive strokes, physicians and other health care providers should pay attention to quality-of-life issues and work to develop better interventions, even gender-specific screening tools, to improve these patients' lives," study senior author Dr. Cheryl Bushnell, an associate professor of neurology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, said in a centre news release.

The researchers looked at 1370 adults, of the age 56 to 77, who had survived a stroke or mini-stroke. The patients were analysed at three months and then after a year. It was noted that women were more likely to have mobility problems, pain and discomfort, as well as anxiety and depression, as compared to their male counterparts.

After a year, women still had poorer overall quality of life than men, but the difference was not as large as at three months, the investigators found.

"We found that age, race and marital status accounted for the biggest differences between men and women at three months, with marital status being the most important," Bushnell said. "Even though the women in the study were older than the men, our study showed that age really had very little effect on quality of life."

The study published online in the journal Neurology needs further research to determine how to improve the lives of female stroke survivors.

Source: HealthDay Reporter

Read more Health News.