WASHINGTON — One in four people who have a stroke will likely die within one year from any cause and 8 percent will suffer a second stroke within a year, researchers said yesterday.
The risks were higher for African-Americans compared with whites and increased with age and the number of other ailments stroke patients had, the researchers wrote in the journal Neurology.
Dr. Wuwei Feng of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston and colleagues studied records of 10,399 hospital patients in the state who had a stroke in 2002.
Feng’s team found that 25 percent of people who had a stroke died within a year and 8 percent had another stroke within a year. They said 50 percent either died or had another stroke or a heart attack within four years.
The risk of heart attack jumped by 14 percent for every 10-year increase in age, and blacks were 16 percent more likely to have another stroke than whites, the study found.