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Australian doctors declared Monday that a cocktail of simple antihypertensive drugs can lower the risk of patients suffering a repeat stroke 1 more than a third. This is the result of their research. The research has been 2 highly as a major breakthrough in stroke prevention.
Strokes kill 5 million people a year, and more than 15 million suffer non-fatal strokes that often 3 them with useless limbs, broken speech and other serious disabilities. One in five stroke 4 goes on to have a second, often fatal, stroke within five years of the first.
An international six-year study of 6,100 patients directed from Sydney University found that by taking two blood pressure-lowering drugs, the risk of secondary strokes can be reduced up to 40 percent. Even taking one of the commonly 5 drugs can cut the risk by a third, the study said. The drugs in combination were 6 even in patients who did not have high blood pressure, the researchers said. They even found that the risk of another stroke could be 7 by three quarters among the one-in-ten patients who had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage (脑出血), the worst type of stroke, 8 there is direct bleeding into the brain.
Stephen McMahon, who 9 the research at the Milan congress of the European Society of Hypertension, said about 50 million people were alive who had suffered at least one stroke. "If most of those patients were able to get 10 to this treatment, it would result 11 maybe the avoidance of half a million strokes a year," the professor told Australia"s ABC Radio.
McMahon said doctors had 12 known that lowering the blood pressure of those with hypertension could help prevent strokes. "What we have shown for the first time is that it does not really 13 what your blood pressure is; if you have had a stroke, then lowering blood pressure will produce large 14 , to begin with—even for people whose blood pressure is average or below average," he said.
McMahon said the Milan gathering had heralded (预示) the research as a "major breakthrough in the care of patients 15 strokes—perhaps the biggest step forward that we have made in the last couple of decades".