Could it be that chronic stress creates adverse changes in the brain that eventually lead to a stroke?
An ischemic stroke is a blood clot in the brain that shuts off oxygen supply to the area that the blocked vessel feeds.
If you think that mental stress that causes heart disease can then trigger a stroke from the heart, wait till you find out about a Swedish study that implies that stress does something to the brain that makes a brain-originating stroke more likely.
The type of stroke in this study was the blood clot kind: A blood vessel in the brain gets a clot that obstructs blood flow to whatever part of the brain that the vessel feeds (also known as a cerebral infarction).
This is more commonly called an ischemic stroke, and the clot can originate from the heart (usually from diseased arteries; the clot in this case is a coronary plaque fragment that travels “upstream” from the heart and gets into the brain).
Or, the clot can develop in a blood vessel of the brain itself.
The study comes from the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg and Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Sweden.
Neurologist Katarina Jood says that interpreting the correlation between mental stress and stroke must be done very cautiously, because for the study, patients who’d had a cerebral infarction were questioned (within 10 days of hospital admission) about their stress levels in the five years prior to their cerebral event.
The problem is that a cerebral event can alter one’s perception or memory of their recent past.
Nevertheless, about 600 patients were asked to fill out a questionnaire, to rate their stress levels over the preceding five years.
Their responses were compared to those of a healthy control group who filled out the same questionnaire.
Findings
There was an independent link between self-perceived mental stress and stroke.
However, this correlation wasn’t the same for the three kinds (in terms of origin) of ischemic stroke that were studied.
– Stress and cerebral infarction were linked when the stroke was caused by blood clots that developed in the brain.
-Stress and cerebral infarction were linked when the stroke was caused by blood clots of undetermined origin.
-Intriguingly, this study did not show a correlation between stress and stroke when the clot originated from the heart.
(Tests are used to determine the origin of the blood clot.)
Might this mean that chronic stress has an adverse effect on blood flow in the brain?
The study was not able to determine why stress seems to play a bigger role in particular kinds of stroke.
Nevertheless, stress and stroke are intertwined.
Your Stress Response
Shutterstock/Charnchai Saeheng
“The stress response stimulates a profound and sudden flooding of stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, into our In the modern world, however, the stress response gets triggered much more often – not by saber toothed tigers but by things such as forgetting to pay a major bill, a visit to the dentist or MRI machine, or hearing your boss say in an unpleasant tone, “I need to see you in my office.”
The result, over time, is increased inflammation, high blood pressure and heart rate, and the increased ability of blood to form clots.
“These physiologic changes create the perfect storm for a stroke,” says Dr. Kennedy.
The risk of atherosclerosis goes up. This condition causes plaque formation in blood vessels.
“Eventually, these changes damage the delicate inner lining of blood vessels and lead to a heart attack or stroke.”
Double board certified in cardiovascular disease and also internal medicine, 
