Hypertensive Women who Smoke are 20 Percent More Prone to Fatal Brain Bleeding

A long-term and population-based Finnish study on SAH (Subarachnoid hemorrhage), conducted on the basis FINRISK health examination surveys has found that a combination of some risk factors like smoking, female gender and hypertension lead to SAH.

SAH (Subarachnoid hemorrhage) is a cerebrovascular catastrophe, which leads to deaths in 40 to 50 percent of cases. It refers to bleeding in the area between the arachnoid membrane and the pia mater surrounding the brain, also known as the subarachnoid space. This hemorrhage may arise spontaneously from a head injury or from a ruptured cerebral aneurysm.

Its symptoms consist of severe headache which starts rapidly, also called thunderclap headache, and lower levels of consciousness or confusion, vomiting and sometimes seizures.

Associate Professor Miikka Korja from the Helsinki University Central Hospital and Australian School of Advanced Medicine was one of the lead authors of this study.  

"Such an extreme risk factor -dependent variation in the incidence of any cardiovascular disease is exceptional, and may have significant clinical implications," Professor Korja said.

Rupture of an intracranial aneurysm is said to be the most common cause of SAH. The main issue is that doctors are not able to determine which ones to touch and which to leave alone, Around 64 349 participants took part in the National FINRISK Study undertaken from 1972 to 2007 in Finland. This study has been published in the edition of PLOS ONE which was released on September 9, 2013.

 A wide variation in the risk factors of SAH was noticed- as much as 8  to 171 per 100 000 person-years, dependent on a combination of risks like smoking and hypertension, which got exacerbated in females.

The research concluded that women who smoked and had high systolic blood pressure values were 20 times more prone to this brain bleeding in comparison to never smoking men with lower blood pressures. These smoking women with hypertensive, suffering from unruptured intracranial aneurysms should be treated unlike the non-smoking men with low blood pressures.

The study also found three new risk factors for SAH: previous myocardial infarction, history of stroke in mother, and elevated cholesterol levels in men, all somewhat similar to cardiovascular risk symptoms.