Poststroke somatic pathology in patients with a history of burdened alcohol abuse

Abstract

Aim: to study concomitant somatic pathology in brain stroke patients abusing alcohol before cerebral catastrophe. Subjects and methods. Two groups were identified according to the results of examining 255 poststroke patients. A study group included 57 (22.4%) pre-stroke alcohol abusers; a control group consisted of 198 (77.6%) alcohol non-abusers. Results. Among the study group patients, lacunar and hemodynamic pathogenetic subtypes of ischemic stroke were encountered 3 times more and 2 times less frequently, respectively, than in the control groups. After cerebral stroke, the study group patients had a clinical picture with a preponderance of diminished cognitive functions, as well as motor disorders mainly as hemiparetic syndrome. Assessment of the pattern of somatic pathology in both group patients revealed a predominance of myocardial infarction by almost 2-fold, hepatobiliary diseases by 4.7-fold, duodenal ulcer disease by 1.6-fold, and bronchopulmonary pathology by 2-fold among the study group patients. Arthrosis deformans and obesity were observed by 6.4 and 3.5 times more frequently, respectively. The incidence of cardiac disease and hypertension in the acute period did not differ greatly in the compared groups. No thyroid pathology was recorded in the study group. In this group, the poststroke period was generally severer or ran as a galloping type in one third of cases. Conclusion. Somatic pathology aggravates the poststroke period, on the one hand, and it is decompensated in the presence of inadequate cerebral blood supply, on the other. Measures to compensate for neuropsychological disorders should be efficiently combined with rehabilitative actions on somatic pathology in poststroke patients with a history of burdened alcohol abuse.

Keywords

• somatic pathology
• stroke
• alcohol abuse