Stroke is on the rise and hitting people at a younger age than ever before.
Strokes are driven by lifestyle risks like hypertension, diabetes, smoking and high cholesterol. And in younger people, all of those diseases are on the rise. As a result, so is the incidence of stroke, now happening at record rates in people beginning at age 18.
According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, there’s an increase of 34 percent in stroke occurrences between ages 18 to 64 over the last 20 years.
Jeremy Payne is with Banner University Medical Center in Phoenix. He said historically stroke risk begins at age 50 to 60.
“More and more people are actually having hypertension and poor control of their blood sugars and high cholesterol that really ought to be treated in that younger age range,” Payne said.
He said the risk factors in younger patients are also increasing faster than older patients.
