A landmark study following the Christchurch mosques shooting has shown "a clear relationship" between large strokes and the stress of catastrophes like terrorist attacks.
The research, a collaboration between Canterbury District Health Board, New Zealand Brain Research Institute (NZBRI) neurologists and statisticians, found “there were four times the number of weekly acute stroke treatments in Christchurch in the week after the terror attacks”.
Canterbury DHB neurologist Dr Teddy Wu said there were nine weekly acute stroke treatments the week after the attack compared with a weekly average of 2.6, while there were “over four times the number of confirmed large strokes (10 compared with the weekly average of 2.4)”.
“Our research shows acute psychological stress does cause a parallel physiologic response increasing the risk of serious strokes,” Wu said.
“During the week of Monday, March 18, three days after the terror attack, the NZBRI team set out to see if there was an increase in strokes in the city. We investigated these possibilities by analysing the association between the terror attack and rate of strokes, and total stroke admissions at Christchurch hospital compared with the national stroke data set.”
Data from elsewhere in New Zealand for that week showed there was no difference in stroke admissions or treatments, Wu said.
“We also did the same analysis for the rest of the country, excluding Christchurch (except for confirmed large strokes as this data was not available) and found no difference in stroke admission or treatments,” he said.
“The statistics suggest the observations of increased treatments and large strokes in Christchurch did not occur by chance.
“The most plausible explanation is the generalised stress response after the terror attack. This may increase risk of blood clotting.”
NZBRI clinical director and professor Tim Anderson says the Christchurch study has been hailed internationally.
“It shows a clear relationship between stress and acute and large strokes. There has never been clinical evidence of this before,” he said.
“Worldwide, post-9/11 New York researchers focused on heart failure, and Japanese researchers reported an increased number of strokes throughout Japan at the time of the earthquake/tsunami in 2011, but in terms of having information about the size of the strokes, our study is unique,” he says.
SHARE ME