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“We found that the substantial incidence of gastrointestinal [GI] bleeding would make it an uncommon complication,” said study author Dr. Martin O’Donnell, an associate professor in the department of medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. “But when it does arise, it appears to be associated with increased death and disability.”

O’Donnell and his colleagues are publishing their findings in the Aug. 6 online issue of Neurology.

The authors focused on just superior 6,800 men and women admitted to 11 Ontario hospitals between 2003 and 2006 following an intense ischemic stroke.

Of these patients, 829 died during their hospital hinder, and 1,374 passed gone within six months of their stroke.

Just 1.5 percent — or 100 patients — had bleeding in their stomach or intestine during their hospitalization. These patients were evenly split among men and women, and more than half had experienced a pleasant or moderate reverse, the research team noted.

Aside from a tripling of mortality in the hospital, stroke patients with GI bleeding were also 1.5 times more likely to die within a half-year of their stroke than those with no such complication. This observation held up even after accounting for other factors that could contribute to mortality, such as pneumonia and will attacks.

O’Donnell noted that the relatively small run over of patients he and his team tracked makes it difficult to definitively identify what type of stroke patients are at highest risk for GI phlebotomy — although that is something he and his colleagues hope to explore down the road. But meanwhile, he argued that the findings even now highlight some hazardous issues concerning stroke recovery.

“One of the key points we want to raise is that the public are generally prone to developing medical complications with stroke,” he said. “And as apportionment of that larger observation, we know that in the midst of these complications are GI issues. And we feel that this is particularly important, because gastrointestinal bleeding is a complication that is potentially modifiable with various treatment strategies.”

However, both Dr. Matthew Fink, chief of the partition of stroke and critical care neurology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, and Dr. Larry B. Goldstein, director of The Stroke Center at Duke University Medical Center, expressed reservations about the findings.

“Having a poorer outcome in stroke patients with gastrointestinal bleeding is not surprising at all,” aforesaid Goldstein. “But I slip on’t know, based on this kind of a retrospective study, if we can tell how preventable this is, as there are all sorts of things that the researchers may not be measuring that might affect the results.”

Fink agreed, while suggesting that the issue itself is not distinctly constraining.

“In the U.S.,” he noted, “we come to terms all our stroke patients with preventive prophylactic therapy to prevent GI bleeding, and our experience is that GI phlebotomy is a rare event. So, it’s really not something we get too concerned about.”

“And that means that the fact that this study shows an increased risk of debt of nature associated with GI bleeding says to me that a gastrointestinal problem is simply a marker for someone who is a lot sicker, not an independent factor promptly related to the stroke itself,” he said. “So, I don’t think this finding gives us much useful new information.”

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