LifeCare Chiropractic

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stroke prevention

Simple Stroke Prevention with This supplement

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folic acid for stroke prevention
freshidea / Dollar Photo Club

Any type of damage to the brain scares most people. Imagine a clot in your brain cutting off blood supply, killing brain cells that allow you to function.

While a survey of 100 people would likely yield all 100 of them voting to NOT damage his or her brain, it seems that most of these 100 people don’t opt to make lifestyle choices that will protect the brain.

Just in case this seems to be a little dramatic, I would point out that cardiovascular disease and stroke share almost identical risk factors.  In a recent blog article I pointed out that not a single person out of over 7,100 were living a lifestyle that included “Life’s Simple 7.”  These are simple lifestyle choices and yet not a single person in the study followed all seven.

Maybe lifestyle changes are just too darn hard to do.  All that exercise, eating right, getting sleep and maintaining an ideal body weight is just too much work.  And society just does not support a healthy lifestyle.

Aren’t there any simple approaches that can lower your risk of stroke?  Keep in mind that I have never been and never will be a “single supplement for a single condition” person.  Supplements should always be used as just one tool among a host of lifestyle changes designed to lower your risk of chronic disease.

That being said, sometimes supplements do show up in the medical literature demonstrating strong effects on preventing chronic disease.  This particular study is just such a situation.  In it, researchers looked at the ability of folic acid to lower the risk of stroke in a group of 20,702 patients with hypertension.

Patients were given either the high blood pressure drug enalapril or enalapril plus 800 mg folic acid.  Here’s what they found after the study was stopped early because the benefits were clear:

  • 7% of those in the enalapril–folic acid group had a first stroke.
  • 4% of those in the enalapril alone group had a first stroke.
  • Overall, those taking the folic acid had a 21% lower risk of having a stroke.
  • The benefit of taking folic acid was far stronger in those who started the study with lower levels of folate in the blood (<5.6 ng/mL). First stroke of 2.8% vs 4.6%, a reduction of 39%.

The results of this study managed to make it to the top of many of the medical websites despite that fact that the absolute numbers are very small (0.7% and 1.8% in the low blood folate patients).  We use the same excitement when we talk about statins and their ability to lower rates of heart attack.

One of the major differences here is that folic acid is a far safer and less expensive approach to protecting your health than the statin class of drugs.  Besides this, statin drugs don’t actually fix anything.  At all.  Folic acid, on the other hand, plays a role in blood vessel health by lowering homocysteine levels, a known irritant to the blood vessels.

The bottom line, however, is not to run out and buy a folic acid supplement.  Rather, a good quality multivitamin will contain a broad spectrum of high quality B vitamins including 800 mg of folic acid as well as vitamin B6 and B12 to make sure they all work well together.

One of my personal favorites is Pure Encapsulations’ Ultra Nutrient, which contains solid levels of folic acid and vitamin B12.

Preventing Stroke: Follow These Simple 5 Tips to Slash Risk

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Ever had a sharp, severe pain in your head? Ever had that fleeting fear that it was a stroke? Then, when you realize you were still intact, did you wonder what a stroke REALLY would feel like?

I know that for me, there is an underlying fear of what they would be like.  A destruction to that all-important brain tissue.  You know—the stuff we REALLY need…

For many seniors that I talk to, protecting their brains is on the top of the list of priorities.  For many of the younger generations, the risk seems remote and not enough to pay any attention to.

The problem with this attitude is that your risk of a stroke begins decades before that stroke ever occurs.  The damage that occurs to your blood vessels, the damage that ultimately leads to a blockage that cuts off the oxygen supply to a region of your brain and kills those cells, can begin as early as childhood.

Things like being diabetic / pre-diabetic (which includes being overweight, having lipid abnormalities like high triglycerides or cholesterol), smoking and living a sedentary lifestyle all produce an “atherogenic” state.  An atherogenic state is one where your blood vessels are slowly damaged, producing a plaque that can, at any time, break off and block a smaller blood vessels further along.

Study after study has shown that the right lifestyle choices will protect your blood vessels and lower your risk of heart attack and stroke.  This particular study is no exception.  Further, just like every other study, it points out just how simple the lifestyle choices can be.  We are not talking about living with the Dalai Lama meditating 6 hours a day and eating only organic tofu and rice while drinking green tea.

Nope.  Not even close.  In this study, looking at 31,696 women living in Sweden, they looked at 5 lifestyle patterns:

  1. A healthy diet (top 50% of a Recommended Food Score)
  2. Moderate alcohol consumption (5–15 g/d)
  3. Never smoking
  4. Physically active (walking/bicycling ≥40 min/d and exercise ≥1 h/wk)
  5. Body mass index below 25 kg/m2.

None of these 5 factors are unreasonable.  The only one you cannot change today is whether or not you smoked in the past.  All the others you can work towards changing today.

So just how powerful were these 5 factors when compared to people who were unhealthy enough to not have any factors?

  • Those who had one positive factor had a 28% lower risk of stroke.
  • Two factors 33% lower.
  • Three factors 43% lower.
  • Four factors slashed risk 46%.
  • All five factors led to a commendable 62% lower risk of having a stroke.

Sixty-two percent drop from 5 basic lifestyle factors.  We are not even talking about short-burst aerobic exercise or specific dietary changes or even supplements shown to lower stroke risk.

If you think this is too much to worry about…This is YOUR BRAIN we are talking about.  If you’ve known a stroke victim that survived, think about the loss of function and the ability to lead the same life he or she did before the event.  If that is not enough to motivate you to make a few simple changes, nothing probably will.