Submitted by hareyan on May 9th, 2008
Noise from brain artery called carotid bruit could be a warning sign of heart attack or stroke risk.
The noise is annoying when it is heard at the main artery passing to the brain. It is caused by turbulent blood flow through one of two arteries that take blood to front and middle parts of brain.
A research by Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington examined data from 22 studies involving 17295 who were followed about 4 years. The study showed that those with carotid bruit have twice as higher risk for heart attack and cardiovascular disease than those without carotid bruit.
The study doesn't necessarily mean that carotid bruit is signaling an upcoming heart attack, because most of study participants already suffered from cardiovascular disease. Another issue of the study is that there are people without carotid bruit who have signs of cardiovascular disease.
It was already known from previous studies that carotid bruit is linked to higher risk for stroke. Therefore the study doesn't really come up with a sensational news. However, the study helps to estimate how high the risk of cardiovascular risk is.
Currently carotid bruit is prompting doctors to treat patients aggressively for stroke prevention, but this new research is to estimate how urging carotid bruit is, how high heart attack risk is, and how aggressive heart treatment should be in case of artery noise.
Source:
eMaxHealth