In a new study, researchers found that people living with or beyond cancer are more likely to die from stroke than the general public.
In addition, certain types of cancer may boost the risk even more.
The research was conducted by a team at Penn State College of Medicine.
According to the researchers, cancer is the leading cause of death in the United States, with stroke being the fifth leading cause.
Previous research has shown that most cancer patients aren’t going to die of their cancer, they’re going to die of something else.
A stroke is one possibility. But while institutions provide separate guidelines for stroke prevention and advice for people beyond cancer treatment, there is little guidance for preventing strokes in people who have or have had cancer.
The researchers used data gathered from the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) program.
They used SEER data on more than 7.2 million patients who had been diagnosed with invasive cancer—cancer that has spread beyond the tissue in which it originally developed—between 1992 and 2015.
The researchers found that men and women had equal chances of dying from a stroke, but those diagnosed with cancer at a younger age had a higher chance of a fatal stroke.
Additionally, they found that among those diagnosed with cancer before they turned 40, most strokes occurred in people treated for brain tumors and lymphomas.
In patients diagnosed with cancer above the age of 40, fatal strokes were most commonly associated with cancer of the prostate, breast, and colon.
One explanation for the increased risk could be that many people who are diagnosed with cancer are in a “prothrombotic” state, which means they are more likely to form a blood clot.
That blood clot may then go to the lungs and cause a pulmonary embolism, for example, or cause a stroke if it goes to the brain. It is a risk factor for a lot of cancer patients.
These findings suggest that patients may benefit from a screening program to help prevent some of these early deaths from stroke, as well as help identify which patients we could target with those preventative efforts.
The lead author of the study is Nicholas Zaorsky, an assistant professor in radiation oncology and public health sciences.
The study is published in Nature Communications.
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