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Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

> High blood pressure and low blood pressure are each risk factors for stroke, and atrial fibrillation — an abnormal heartbeat — is, too

And obesity, and diabetes, and smoking, and hyperlipidaemia, and sedentarism...

We already have the cure but we sell the disease at every streets' corners

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I had a stroke six months ago.

My blood pressure is a touch high, but nothing concerning. I do not have afib. I am a healthy weight, no diabetes, nonsmoker, good cholesterol levels, and between judo, BJJ, and snowboarding I exercise between 15-20 hours a week across 3-6 days. I am 39.

I woke up unable to move the right half of my body and unable to speak except maybe one word at a time with extreme effort. It was terrifying.

Thankfully, my clot broke up on its own in maybe an hour and a half and didn’t require medical intervention. I effectively recovered fully on the same day and was sent home the next.

Did you take any medication, that may cause blood cloth as a side effect? It may happen again...

Fellow BJJ player here – there have been numerous references to the increased risk of vascular injuries and stroke resulting from the high number of chokes that we routinely practice. One study, for instance, found that even brief interruptions in blood flow to the brain during a choke can result in cognitive deficits and other negative health outcomes (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5678212/).

I'm very glad to hear you recovered quickly, and encouraged by the potential for new treatments to help save more lives.

There was no evidence of a vascular dissection in my case. It was either a clot or other piece of debris that made its way to my brain, potentially via a PFO.

I suspect the person you're responding to was just throwing that out carotid dissection as an example; the general risk factor with BJJ is vessel wall injury (which dissection is a subset of). Blood clots from vessel trauma in peripheral parts of the body can migrate to cause thrombosis elsewhere.

Chokes are a big cause of vessel trauma, but hard takedowns, pressure passes, accidental strikes from spazzy white-belts, etc. all count too. Anything that can cause major bruising, really.

To be clear, I'm not trying to argue that anyone should avoid BJJ due to cardiovascular risk, and the sport is probably a large net benefit to cardiovascular health on the whole - but it can certainly be a proximate cause of a stroke if you get unlucky.

Interesting, I hadn't heard about the bit about clots from vessel trauma in peripheral areas.

Thankfully I'm getting my PFO closed in two weeks. The left and right sides of the heart should be isolated systems, and a PFO is a hole that potentially allows a clot to travel from the body side to the brain side. Hopefully if this was related to that, closing the hole will prevent such a thing from happening in the future. Apparently if the hole is closed, a clot would likely travel to the lungs, which are significantly better at coping with it than the brain is.

Yes of course, but that's not the majority of cases. Some people also survive car crashes by not wearing their seatbelts for example.

I'm not saying this is a bad news, but we should't let people think medicine will bring a magic pill for all their issues when they're just slowly killing themselves with bad habits

I got afib from years of running. I hear you about smoking, etc., but sometimes stuff happens. I was very glad they invented an effective treatment (an operation).

Sure, but fluke things exists. I had one young, fit, healthy, thin and nothing was found. I saw quite a lot (most for sure) of people on the young-stroke ward who were in the same boat.

You saw other healthy young thin people, in the ward, because the people that had strokes that didn’t fit that demographic went to the morgue. Survivorship bias, not to say that OC is right, just pointing it out.

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