Nobody thinks about stroke and preventing a stroke until it happens to them or someone close to them. Then it may be too late. Every year, more
than 795,000 people in the U.S. have a stroke and 130,000 die. Medi-Rents and Sales wants you to think about stroke now and do what you can to lower your stroke chances.
Stroke is not 100 percent preventable. Anyone at any age can have a stroke, but there are many known risk factors that can be managed to reduce the risk of stroke. Medical experts do say that 80 percent of strokes are preventable through lifestyle changes.
There are three major stroke factors that put almost half of Americans at risk. Those factors are high blood pressure, high LDL cholesterol and smoking. High blood pressure and high cholesterol are the direct result of the unhealthy American lifestyle of too much food and not enough exercise. There are other risk factors including diabetes, being overweight and obese, poor diet, physical inactivity and excessive alcohol use. Most of these are also the result of the American lifestyle.
What are some of the effects of stroke? The physical effects include vision loss and vision problems, seizures, incontinence of bladder and bowel, paralysis on various parts of the body and often half of the person’s body, trouble eating and swallowing, muscle spasticity. Drop foot and walking issues, pain and fatigue.
Those are the physical issues, but there are also many cognitive issues too. Many stroke patients have a loss of cognitive function and a form of dementia, loss of short term memory (depending on the part of the brain affected), loss of communication and reading skills, depression and uncontrolled bouts of crying and laughing.
If you or someone in your life is recovering from a stroke, Medi-Rents and Sales has a wide variety of home medical equipment and bathroom safety equipment to make their recovery easier. Please see us today.
Sources: Stroke.org and the CDC
Tags: stroke risks