In the United States alone, someone has a stroke every 45 seconds and someone dies of stroke every 3 minutes.  As the number 3 cause of death among Americans (cancer and heart disease are the leading causes), stroke costs our healthcare system $57 billion each year.¹

 

Put simply, a stroke is when a blood vessel that carries oxygen and nutrients to the brain is either blocked by a clot or bursts. This causes parts of the brain to be unable to receive the blood it needs, so it starts to die.²  Since this is the same chain of events that happens in your heart during a heart attack, you can think of a stroke as a “heart attack in your brain.”

 

Risk factors for stroke include having type 2 diabetes and heart disease, smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, and being physically inactive.³  Now a new study⁴ has found another risk factor: vitamin D deficiency.

 

Recent research has started to highlight the health benefits of vitamin D supplementation in the elderly, most notably helping to decrease falls and hip fractures.  In the newest study, researchers measured vitamin D levels in blood taken from 44 patients within 30 days of a first-ever stroke.  To establish a normal range, researchers also took blood samples from 96 healthy elderly volunteers every 2 months for 1 year.

 

Researchers found that while only 3 of the 44 stroke patients had higher than average vitamin D levels, 30 of the 44 stroke patients had vitamin D levels “significantly” below normal and “at the lower limit of good health.”

 

These results caused the researchers to conclude that vitamin D’s role in preventing stroke may lie in “conserving bone, restoring muscle strength, and reducing falls.”  Therefore, stroke patients should be screened for vitamin D deficiency, vitamin D should now receive consideration as a “potential risk marker for stroke” and that further studies should be done to explore vitamin D’s role in stroke risk.

 

 

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