14 DAY TRIAL // Mexican-American stroke survivors that have a heart rhythm disorder have a second stroke risk twice as high as the non-Hispanic white stroke survivors, according to a study published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.
For the study, scientists compared 88 Mexican-American and 148 non-Hispanic white stroke survivors with an atrial fibrillation, collecting data from January 2000 to June 2008.
These results are based on cases of ischemic stroke and transient ischemic attack from the Brain Attack Surveillance in Corpus Christi Project.
The researchers found that the probability of having another stroke during the study's observation period was more than double for Mexican-Americans than for non-Hispanic whites.
And even if the recurrence of stroke was higher and they were more severe among Mexican-Americans, there was no difference in the death rates between the two groups.
Also the study highlighted that Mexican-American patients were much younger, more likely to suffer from diabetes and less likely to have completed 12 years of education or to have a primary care physician.
As for the severity of the first stroke, scientists found no ethnic differences between the two groups, according to the American Heart Association.
During the observation period, 19 Mexican-Americans and 14 non-Hispanic whites had at least one recurrent stroke over an average of 427.5 days.
Only one Mexican-American patient has a intracerebral hemorrhage, all other health problems being ischemic stroke.
Darin B. Zahuranec, MD, study co-author and an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Michigan Cardiovascular Center in Ann Arbor said that “based on some of our prior research, we were not necessarily surprised by the higher recurrence risk in Mexican-Americans with atrial fibrillation, but the greater severity of recurrent strokes in Mexican-Americans was surprising.”
A possible explanation for this difference could be that the management of the blood thinning drug warfarin is inadequate among Mexican-Americans, Zahuranec said, though there was no ethnic difference in the proportion of patients who were prescribed the drug at hospital discharge.
Nearly 2.2 million Americans are affected by atrial fibrillation and about 15 of them suffer from stokes.
Atrial fibrillation is a disorder in which the heart’s upper chambers (called the atria) beat irregularly and don’t pump blood effectively, possibly causing blood to pool within the atria and blood clot formation in the heart.
Corpus Christi has a large Mexican-American population and is located along the Gulf coast of Texas and the Brain Attack Surveillance in Corpus Christi Project is a population-based stroke surveillance study.
This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.