I Stroke symptoms in women they are often different from men. We know that recognizing them as quickly as possible is essential. Time, when talking about this pathology, plays a crucial role. The human brain has approximately 86 billion neurons. For every minute that passes after a stroke attack it loses almost 2 million. The estimate is from the American Heart Associationthe American Cardiologists Association.
In Italy every year, approximately 185,000 people are affected by a brain stroke. Of these, 150,000 are new cases while 35,000 are those that repeat after the first episode.
What are the most common symptoms of stroke?
Doctors enclose the symptoms in the phrase BE FAST (be quick, in Italian). She has a double meaning. Of course that of its meaning, because you need to be quick in the presence of symptoms of a stroke. The second lies in the fact that it is an acronym that contains the main symptoms of the disease:
loss of balance, changes in vision, drooping of the face, weakness in the arm, difficulty speaking, time to call for help.
In English: Balance loss, Eyesight changes, Face drooping, Arm weakness, Speech difficulty, Time to call 911 (911 in the USA corresponds to ours 112). BE FAST indeed.
What are the symptoms of stroke in women?
However, these are the most common symptoms, which do not reflect the experience of all patients. More and more scientific research is demonstrating that women experience atypical symptoms that are much more vague.
Symptoms that can affect women are:
severe headache, weakness, tiredness, shortness of breath, chest pain, nausea, vomiting, cognitive fog, hiccups.
These symptoms they can appear suddenly and can be confused for other health problems. The manifestations do not improve with the passage of time.
Stroke symptoms in women: attention to the severity and contemporaneity of their manifestation
Some of these symptoms, such as hiccups, may seem random.
Il Stroke-related hiccups may be a sign of brain damage to regions such as the medulla oblongata, which controls breathing, and the supratentorial cortex, involved in the control of movements.
Of course now you don’t have to think about stroke every time a woman has hiccups. Symptoms become worrying when they are so severe that they affect the ability to move. You need to be careful if the hiccups are so intense that they hurt your throat or appear together with other symptoms.
Why are symptoms different in women than in men?
Experts are trying to explain this gender diversity in symptoms. The first hypothesis is that hormones are to blame. The estrogens they protect women against stroke, thanks to their anti-inflammatory capacity. Furthermore, these hormones improve blood flow to the brain thanks to their action on the carotid arteries, the arteries that carry blood to the brain. As we know, women stop producing estrogen as they age.
However, this only happens with natural estrogens produced by women’s bodies. The synthetic ones contained in some contraceptive pills or in hormone replacement therapy increase the risk of stroke, albeit slightly. About 8.5 out of every 100,000 women taking these therapies may have a stroke event in their lifetime.
Also pregnancy can have an impact, because it triples the risk of stroke in young women. This is due to preeclampsiaa blood pressure-related phenomenon that can affect pregnant women.