A large analysis reviewing 16 international studies on strokes found that young women under 35 years old are 44 times more likely to have an ischemic stroke than men.
And women who survive ischemic strokes tend to experience difficult outcomes more often than men who survive strokes.
Ischemic strokes which occur when a blood clot blocks an artery leading to the brain account for 87 percent Trusted Source of all strokes.
The new analysis Trusted Source shows that even though it’s widely believed that men may have a higher chance of stroke, ischemic stroke tends to impact more young women than young men each year.
Why that occurs is still unclear, but cardiologists suspect oral contraceptives, pregnancy, and childbirth may impact young women’s chance of stroke.
Dr. Hoang Nguyen, an interventional cardiologist at MemorialCare Heart & Vascular Institute at Orange Coast Medical Center in Fountain Valley, California, says he has seen an increase in young people presenting with heart attacks and stroke more and more of whom are women.
Women often have atypical presentation of heart attacks, and the same may be true for stroke, accord-ing to Nguyen.
“This article really touches on something many clinicians have known in their gut and from clinical experience. More research is needed to broaden our understanding of ischemic stroke in younger women to improve clinical outcomes,” Nguyen told Health-line.
Symptoms of a stroke in women can include the following: nausea or vomiting Seizures hiccups trouble breathing
pain fainting or loss of consciousness general weakness Young women tend to have more strokes than young men The researchers evaluated 16 studies conducted between 2008 and 2021 and looked at how common strokes were in men and women across various age groups.
The analysis included a combined total of 69,793 young adults — 33,775 women and 36,018 men.
The researchers found that the sex differences in stroke were most pronounced in younger adults under 35 years old.
Young women were 44 times more likely to experi-ence an ischemic stroke than men.
Additionally, women who survived ischemic stroke faced a 2 to 3 times higher chance of difficult func-tional outcomes compared to men who survived ischemic stroke.
