May is National Stroke Awareness Month. Here are the most common causes and risk factors.

With May being National Stroke Awareness Month, many are thinking about the best ways to keep our brains healthy and functioning. The immediate causes of stroke are burst blood vessels or blocked arteries, but it’s easy to confuse those with risk factors.

Environmental specialist Douglas Mulhall talks about the top causes and risk factors of strokes that we tend to overlook. 

Cause #1: Your immune system attacks you.
The immune system backfires when it tries to protect you against chronic environmental threats. As a result, a quiet revolution is shaking stroke research due to the growing realization that  misguided immunity is responsible for many stroke factors, and may trigger strokes themselves. A chronic immune response triggers inflammation that leads to hardening of arteries and plaque buildup. This is being investigated in the rapidly growing field of epigenetics, which looks at how the environment trains your genes to react.

Cause #2: The elastic in your arteries is damaged. 
There would probably be no strokes from burst blood vessels if your arteries kept their elasticity. A blood vessel usually bursts due to elastic in the artery wall being stiffened or weakened. In 2021, for the first time, restoring the elastic in arteries of aortic aneurysm patients was reported, based on 20 years of research at Clemson University in South Carolina. This major breakthrough signals a paradigm shift in stroke prevention and therapy.

Risk factor #1: Toxic metals increase stroke risk. 
The correlation is growing between hemorrhagic stroke and levels of toxic metals like lead and cadmium. Toxic metals occur naturally in our environment and are also generated by industry. These provoke an immune response (see cause #1)  Therapies that reverse similar causes and risk factors have shown surprising results in cardiovascular patients who have Critical Limb Ischemia. Amputation risk was eliminated and arteries were un-blocked with this therapy. As metals were flushed out of patients, their condition improved.

Risk factor #2: Where you live.
Strokes are more common among people living in the southeastern U.S. than in other areas. Stroke deaths occur more often during extreme temperatures, and are more common among low-income communities due to higher levels of stress from financial instability.