Iranians in Iran also begin to suffer from strokes at an earlier age than people in some Western countries, the study found.
Researchers lead by Dr. Mahmoud-Reza Azarpazhooh, a practitioner at the Ghaem Hospital in Mashhad, published their study in the journal Stroke. The study followed over 450,000 Iranian adults and found that in one year, 624 of them suffered their first stroke. When the researchers compared their numbers against those in Western countries like the UK, Italy, Greece, Australia and Sweden, they found that this number was substantially higher.
Iranian men and women between the ages of 45 and 84 suffered from a total of 743 strokes per 100,000 persons. Western countries, including the five listed above, had stroke rates of 200 to 400 per 100,000 persons. According to the study, the only country suffering from a higher stroke rate is Ukraine.
The published study said Iranians generally suffer strokes a decade earlier than those in the West: Iranians begin to show higher risk factors when they are 45 to 54 years old.
Dr. Azarpazhooh’s study was unable to point a finger at the cause of this disparity. He and his colleagues speculate those in Iran may not be controlling stroke risk factors properly. Their support for this conjecture resides in the finding that nearly half of Iranian stroke sufferers with high blood pressure admitted they had “poor compliance” with their treatment—meaning they weren’t doing what their doctors recommended for their high blood pressure. Sixty-one percent of individuals with high cholesterol and 36 percent of diabetes patients also reported “poor compliance.”
The report in Stroke ended on the understanding that more research is needed to clarify this phenomenon; however, it is clear that health authorities in Iran must “address this high incidence of stroke, particularly in the young.”
