Strokes will never be preventable. You can mitigate them but a stroke isn't really a disease. It's a symptom.
An ischemic stroke (i.e. stroke due to a clot) caused by vascular or cardiac issues can be mitigated. A cryptogenic stroke however is idiopathic and therefore has no understood cause. These types of strokes make up 30-40% of all strokes. Unless we figure out their cause, there's no way to really prevent them.
But then there's also hemorrhagic strokes which are an entirely separate category that has causes and mitigations more or less diametrically opposed to those for ischemic strokes.
And of course those are just your broad painted categories and they are generally looked at as the start of a medical emergency but strokes happen all the time as a consequence of other medical emergencies.
Even if you could perfectly prevent strokes in generally healthy populations, those same people may still end up suffering from a stroke during a surgery or during/after a major accident or injury. No amount of preventative medication can prevent someone suffering a stroke caused by a brain bleed after a car accident. Likewise for someone with a crush injury, internal bleeding, or broken bones that end up throwing a clot which makes it into the brain.
So any advancement in halting and reversing damage from a stroke will be a massive boon for emergency medicine until the end of time. Unless of course we somehow find a way to cure/render humans immune to blunt force trauma or lacerations.
alt Hacker News
Strokes will never be preventable. You can mitigate them but a stroke isn't really a disease. It's a symptom.
An ischemic stroke (i.e. stroke due to a clot) caused by vascular or cardiac issues can be mitigated. A cryptogenic stroke however is idiopathic and therefore has no understood cause. These types of strokes make up 30-40% of all strokes. Unless we figure out their cause, there's no way to really prevent them.
But then there's also hemorrhagic strokes which are an entirely separate category that has causes and mitigations more or less diametrically opposed to those for ischemic strokes.
And of course those are just your broad painted categories and they are generally looked at as the start of a medical emergency but strokes happen all the time as a consequence of other medical emergencies.
Even if you could perfectly prevent strokes in generally healthy populations, those same people may still end up suffering from a stroke during a surgery or during/after a major accident or injury. No amount of preventative medication can prevent someone suffering a stroke caused by a brain bleed after a car accident. Likewise for someone with a crush injury, internal bleeding, or broken bones that end up throwing a clot which makes it into the brain.
So any advancement in halting and reversing damage from a stroke will be a massive boon for emergency medicine until the end of time. Unless of course we somehow find a way to cure/render humans immune to blunt force trauma or lacerations.