Prevention Strategies Fall Short
The data also showed that stroke-related disability-adjusted life-years rose from around 121.4 million years of healthy life lost in 1990 to 160.5 million years in 2021, making stroke the fourth leading cause of health loss worldwide after COVID-19, ischemic heart disease, and neonatal disorders.
“The global growth of the number of people who develop stroke and died from or remain disabled by stroke is growing fast, strongly suggesting that currently used stroke prevention strategies are not sufficiently effective,” lead author Valery L. Feigin, MD, PhD, from Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand, and affiliate professor at IHME, said in the release.
“New, proven effective population-wide and motivational individual prevention strategies that could be applied to all people at risk of having a stroke, regardless of the level of risk, as recommended in the recent Lancet Neurology Commission on Stroke should be implemented across the globe urgently,” said Dr. Feigin.
Dr. Elkind said the AHA supports research on the effects of air quality on risk for vascular injury and stroke and has “long advocated for policies to mitigate the adverse health impacts of air pollutants, including reduction of vehicle emissions and renewable portfolio standards, taking into account racial, ethnic, and economic disparities.”
“AHA, and the healthcare sector more broadly, must take a leadership role in recommending policies to improve environmental air quality and in working with the private sector and industry to improve air quality,” Dr. Elkind said.
In an accompanying commentary, Ming Liu, MD, and Simiao Wu, MD, PhD, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China, wrote that “pragmatic solutions to the enormous and increasing stroke burden include surveillance, prevention, acute care, and rehabilitation.”
“Surveillance strategies include establishing a national-level framework for regular monitoring of stroke burden, risk factors, and healthcare services via community-based surveys and health records,” they noted.
“Artificial intelligence and mobile technologies might not only facilitate the dissemination of evidence-based health services but also increase the number of data sources and encourage participation of multidisciplinary collaborators, potentially improving the validity and accuracy of future GBD estimates,” they added.
This study was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Author disclosures are listed with the original article.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.