A study reported in The Lancet found that the standard treatment for lowering a patient’s blood pressure after a stroke is dangerous and should be stopped immediately.
Doctors have been trained to aggressively lower blood pressure levels after dissolving the blood clot in the brain that caused the stroke. What these researchers have found is doing this is causing major disabilities and killing new brain tissue in patients.
The researchers recruited 816 people who had a stroke blocking their blood vessels. Half had the standard treatment to lower blood pressure below 120 mm Hg and the other half had their blood pressure lowered to between 140 to 180 mm Hg. The researchers wanted to reach this level within an hour and keep it there for 3 days.
The patients who had the standard treatment suffered major disabilities and weren’t seeing any improvement in their ability to move their body.
While the researchers know that the dangerous level is the current treatment, they still need to figure out what the optimum level should be following a stroke.
In case you know someone who has a stroke you want to immediately tell their docs about this research and tell them not to do the standard treatment – period! You can google ‘lowering blood pressure after a stroke is dangerous’ to find a number of confirming studies you can give the doc.
(Reported The Lancet, 2022)
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