Shortly after a stroke, young patients are diagnosed with cancer more often than young people who were not affected by a stroke. This provides indications that cancer may play a role in the development of stroke in these patients. That appears from research of Radboud university medical center in nearly 400,000 stroke patients.
The researchers have been conducting research on young patients with strokes for some time. She had noticed before that quite a few of these patients eventually die of cancer. They collected data from nearly 400,000 Dutch people who suffered a stroke between 1995 and 2018.
They mapped out how many of these people were subsequently treated for cancer. They compared that with the number of cancer cases in people without strokes. It turned out that the number of cancer diagnoses in the following year was 2.5 times higher in patients younger than 50 years with a cerebral infarction. For young patients with a cerebral haemorrhage, this was even more than 5 times higher.
It mainly concerned lung cancer and blood cancer. According to the researchers, it is likely that the cancer was already present when the patient had the stroke; the diagnosis had not yet been made. In addition, cancer is known to activate coagulation.
However, it is still too early to screen all young stroke patients for cancer. More research is needed first, for example into specific characteristics that are associated with an increased risk of cancer in these patients.
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