People who have had cancer or are currently living with the disease are twice as likely to die of stroke as those who have not had cancer, say investigators from Penn State.
In fact, most cancer patients will die not of cancer, but for other reasons including stroke, reported researcher and radiation oncologist Nicholas Zaorsky, M.D. Yet there is little guidance for preventing stroke in these patients, he added.
“Our findings suggest that patients may benefit from a screening program to help prevent some of these early deaths from stroke as well as help identify which patients we could target with those preventative efforts,” he said.
To find the cancers most linked with stroke, Zaorsky and colleagues used data from the National Cancer Institute that covers about 28% of the U.S. population. They found that breast, prostate and colorectal cancers are most commonly tied to fatal stroke.
The study team theorized that one explanation for the increased risk could be that cancer often affects how blood coagulates, putting people at risk for forming clots.
“That blood clot may then go to the lungs and cause a pulmonary embolism, for example, or cause a stroke if it goes to the brain,” Zaorsky said. “In general, it’s an underlying theme and risk factor for a lot of cancer patients.”
The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.
