Daniel Lackland, a professor of neuroscience at the Medical University of South Carolina and a spokesman for the American Heart Association, has developed a scale of lifestyle factors that have a bearing on stroke risk, called the "Life's Simple Seven" scale, 3 which includes:
- Get active
- Control your cholesterol
- Eat better
- Manage your blood pressure
- Lose weight
- Reduce your blood sugar, and
- Stop smoking
The really good news here is that even minor changes can reduce your stroke risk. As reported by the featured NPR article:4
"[The] scientists dug into a large study that tracked 30,239 people to see how much improvement it takes to prevent stroke....The good news is it doesn't take much to make a difference.
Each risk factor for stroke was scored from 0 to 2, with 0 being crummy, 1 kind of OK, and 2 terrific. Even a one-point improvement in the total score across all seven factors significantly reduced stroke risk.
Each improvement of a point on the 14-point scale meant an 8 percent reduction in stroke. 'The neat thing of this finding is that anything makes a difference... If you make a small change, you make an improvement,' Lackland says. 'If you make a bigger change, you make a bigger improvement.'
Some changes can give you a really great payoff. The study showed that reducing your systolic blood pressure by 20 millimeters (regardless of how high your blood pressure currently is) decreases your risk of stroke by 50 percent. Reduce it by another 20 mm, and you cut your individual risk in half yet again. Not smoking, or quitting smoking equated to a 40 percent lower risk.
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