Stroke recurrence and osteoporotic conditions in postmenopausal patients with atherosclerotic ischemic stroke.

Recurrence after stroke is common, and associated with a high mortality rate. Degradation of the elastic tissue in the arterial wall has been shown to aggravate atherosclerosis in blood vessels. Considering that type 1 collagen is present in both bone and vascular smooth muscle cells, we explored whether osteoporotic conditions affect the likelihood of stroke recurrence in postmenopausal women following atherosclerotic ischemic stroke. To determine actual bone mineral density (BMD), the Hounsfield unit values in the frontal skull were evaluated using brain computed tomography (CT) scans taken at admission. A multivariate Cox regression analysis was also performed to examine if osteoporosis could independently predict stroke recurrence in postmenopausal patients with large artery atherosclerosis (LAA) or small vessel occlusion (SVO) stroke. This study included 2130 consecutive patients (both males and females aged 50 and older) with acute LAA or SVO strokes. After adjusting for all covariates, hypothetical osteoporosis was identified as an independent predictor of stroke recurrence in female patients ≥50 years with acute LAA or SVO stroke (hazard ratio, 1.84; 95 % confidence interval, 1.05 to 3.24; p = 0.034). Our findings showed that osteoporosis could potentially affect the recurrence of ischemic stroke in postmenopausal patients with LAA or SVO stroke.
Competing Interests: The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Myung-Hoon Han reports financial support was provided by the Basic Science Research Program through the 10.13039/501100003725National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning (NRF-2022R1F1A1063739). Yu Deok Won reports financial support was provided by 10.13039/501100002380Hanyang University (HY-202200000000911). If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(© 2024 The Authors.)