only one in three of the patients were aware that smoking increased strokes

It seems incredible that some people continue to smoke even after they have had a stroke but the evidence shows that despite the damage that smoking causes to the brain, some smokers just carry on puffing away!

A new scientific research project shows however that depending on which part of the brain is damaged by the stroke it can affect the likelihood of them subsequently quitting. Smokers who had a stroke which damaged the part of the brain that deals with processing emotions were much more likely to quit than those smokers whose stroke impacted on a different part of the brain. In fact the researchers said that when a stroke damaged the insular cortex responsible for processing emotions the likelihood of quitting was doubled!

Another finding of the study was that those people who had previously made a plan to quit smoking before their stroke were also more likely to quit smoking following the stroke compared to those smokers who had not considered quitting.

For this study Professor Rosa Suner from the Josep Trueta Hospital and the Girona University in Spain looked at 110 smoking individuals who had survived a stroke.  The medical records of the patients were observed for a year after leaving hospital after their stroke and it would seem that both psychological and physiological aspects came into play when determining whether a stroke victim would quit smoking.

The study also highlighted that only one in three of the patients were aware that smoking increased the chances of suffering from a stroke and that the other 2/3 either said there was either no correlation between smoking and strokes or they said they had no idea if there was a link. 

Incredibly out of the 110 patients who took part in this study 34 of them continued to smoke when they left hospital. Out of the 76 who did quit smoking, only 44 of them still managed to stay smoke free a year later meaning that more than 50 percent of these stroke victims carried on smoking despite the warnings and the evidence!

The research was published in full by the medical journal Stroke.