NEW ORLEANS — Strokes have tripled in recent years among middle-aged women in the U.S., an alarming trend doctors blame on the obesity epidemic.
Nearly 2 percent of women ages 35 to 54 reported suffering a stroke in the most recent federal health survey, from 1999 to 2004. A little over half a percent did in the previous survey, from 1988 to 1994.
The percentage is small because most strokes occur in older people. But the sudden spike in middle age and the reasons behind it are ominous, doctors said in research presented Wednesday at a medical conference.
It happened even though more women in the recent survey were on drugs to control cholesterol and blood pressure.
Women’s waistlines were nearly 2 inches bigger than a decade earlier, and that bulge corresponds with the increase in strokes, researchers said.
In addition, women’s average body mass index, a commonly used measure of obesity, rose from 27 in the earlier survey to 29. They also had higher blood sugar levels.
No other traditional risk factors, such as smoking, heart disease and diabetes, changed enough between the two surveys to account for the increase in strokes.
In a “pre-stroke population” of middle-age women, a tripling of cases is “an alarming increase,” said Dr. Ralph Sacco, neurology chief at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
The study was led by Dr. Amytis Towfighi, a neurology specialist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and was presented at the International Stroke Conference in New Orleans.
Researchers saw that the stroke rate had spiked in middle-aged women but stayed about the same — around 1 percent — in middle-aged men. So they looked deeper into the responses for reasons.
Belly fat stood out, Towfighi said. The portion of women with abdominal obesity rose from 47 percent in the earlier survey to 59 percent in the recent one.
The change in men was smaller, and “abdominal obesity is a stronger risk factor for women than men,” she said.
